A lapsed Catholic, I’d been an altar boy for many years and was belatedly discovering that, though I’d successfully flushed most Catholic doctrine from my system, the vocabulary of my former faith- sin, redemption, grace-obstinately remained.
I did bring a fair amount of personal context to his work. I raise this issue because I was in graduate school, trying to become a writer, when I first read Andre Dubus, and my relationship to his stories was largely “original” in the sense that I knew very little about him. I was grateful for our guide in Venice, but, by the end of the two days we spent in his company, my wife and I began to sense his own blind spots. What we’re talking about here is context, which can either enlighten or blind us. When you’re told what to look for, he reasoned, you’ll likely find it, and, having found it, you’ll be less likely to notice what you otherwise might have. Still, it put me in mind of an old professor of mine, who argued for developing “an original relationship” to the books we studied, by which he seemed to mean that we should come to our own conclusions before entertaining the opinions of professional critics. It’s unlikely that I would have seen that on my own. But we were told that the work was considered blasphemous when it was made, as the pair were not, as tradition demanded, in the exact center of the image. To my untutored eye, it appeared to be a devout depiction of the Madonna and Child. In the former, he drew our attention to a painting of Mary and the infant Jesus.
Some years ago, in Venice, my wife and I hired a tour guide to shepherd us through the collections at the Galleria dell’Accademia and the Scuola Grande di San Rocco. Andre Dubus’s stories offer not comfort but truth.
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