Snow and Strippers

Snowbound for days, you would reasonably assume that I did nothing but read pile after pile of books, gleefully thankful that my mini-van was undriveable, work unaccessible, and the outside world an unreachable, distant memory. Not so much.

During my houseboundness, I spent way too much time napping, a solid amount of hours watching DVDs (season 4 of LOST) and only a limited number of minutes churning through the tower of books that threatens to fall from my bedside table and crush me in the wee hours of the night before Frida has a chance to wake me up for her ass-crack-of-dawn pee.

When I wasn't sleeping or watching Matthew Fox (!!!), I read one highly recommendable work of fiction, The Garden of Last Days by Andre Dubus III. A few years back, I risked alienating some of you by enthusiastically promoting Dubus's novel House of Sand and Fog, a book which, apparently, has the ability to really piss a lot of people off and provoke arguments among otherwise peaceable friends.

Good news! The Garden of Last Days threatens to do the exact same thing, and I know most of you will read it anyway. Like House of Sand and Fog, Dubus's new novel revolves around a circle of loosely connected characters whose fates intertwine by chance. Just as in the earlier novel, readers will love and hate these people, peeking through their fingers to watch as they repeatedly take steps to insure that their lives will be hopelessly screwed up. Yet even as we watch their lives devolve in a series of bad decisions, their stories are impossible to abandon.

The action takes place in Florida, in the three days preceding the 9/11/2001 attacks. A single mother struggling to save for a home and stuck without her usual babysitter must bring her three-year-old daughter to work with her at The Puma Club for Men, arranging for another of the dancers to watch her daughter. At the club that night is Bassam, a Muslim man preparing to sacrifice his life for his religion. Also in the audience is AJ, a young father whose wife has recently kicked him out of the house. The unlikely confluence of these individuals at this place on this night makes for an unforgettable, gripping read.

It's unlikely that many readers would expect to sympathize with a stripper, a wife-beater, and a 9/11 conspirator, and yet Dubus so completely realizes these characters' lives, their hopes, dreams, doubts, and passions, that it is impossible not to understand what motivates them and moves them to live as they do. Certain to inspire much discussion and thought, this is one of the most powerful novels I've read.