A review by beefmaster
Such Kindness by Andre Dubus III

3.0

I'd like to give this 3.5 but Goodreads, you know what I mean. Anyway, a pretty good novel about pain and disability and fatherhood and responsibility. I thought the prose was okay, maybe a little too sleek considering it's a first person narrator who, by his own admission, isn't a thinker, but a doer. I read the transcript of the NPR interview with Dubus and this gave me some welcome insight into the book: Dubus is himself a carpenter, and his famous father lost his leg trying to be a Good Samaritan, two facts I didn't know. There's something about both Dubus writers and their obsession with random acts of violence/trauma/meetings which become the primum movens of the plot. Often, idle story ideas pop into my head and after thinking on them for more than a minute, I realize they're just rehashes of "Killings," the standout Dubus II story or House of Sand and Fog, the outstanding Dubus III novel. They're both haunted by the crashing of different, flawed people stuck on their trajectories. The same thing applies here: different, well drawn people are crashing into each other, for good and for bad.