[Sigal is an American novelist and educator. In the following review, he analyzes the strengths and weaknesses of The Last Worthless Evening, pointing out Dubus's sympathy for his characters.]

In Andre Dubus's fine story "Rose," a nameless former Marine Corps lieutenant muses in a bar: "We like to believe that in this last quarter of the century, we know and are untouched by everything; yet it takes only a very small jolt, at the right time, to knock us off balance for the rest of our lives." That could be the keynote of the four novellas and two short stories in The Last Worthless Evening, dealing mainly with ordinary people whose common bond is a kind of ecstasy of despair, which can also be their source of strength.

Mr. Dubus's own strength—and weakness—is that he is compelled to tell his stories at an angle, from left field, sometimes through an unlikely narrator whose intrusive thoughts can divert and even blunt the natural rhythms of a tale. He is much given to emphatic spiritual pondering, as if he doesn't quite trust his characters to pull their weight. A pity, because Mr. Dubus's talent lies in his love and sympathy for people—petty criminals, baseball players, single mothers, drunks and addicts—who get their hands dirty with life.

Stripped of its fustian, "Rose" is about an alcoholic working-class woman who lives at the bottom of a glass but whose brutish self-hatred is redeemed by a single memory—the time she saved her two children from an apartment set afire by her insanely frustrated husband. The narrator, a former Marine, links this act of moral and physical assertion with an officer-candidate washout he once saw superhumanly lift a huge barracks locker while sleepwalking. Even the worst of us, Mr. Dubus seems to be saying, is capable of heroic selflessness under certain extremes of pressure.

When Mr. Dubus lets his stories speak for themselves they have an undeniable power and cleansing mercy. Yet he will interfere, indulgently letting his characters ramble on in a sort of lachrymose Higher Brooding. This almost ruins a potentially crackling story, "Dressed Like Summer Leaves," in which an eleven-year-old boy, casually dressed in camouflage trousers, triggers a Vietnam veteran into mauling him in a local bar. The boy's precocious ruminations caused me to lose confidence in the incident and its intent.

In perhaps the worst of these tales, "Deaths at Sea," about a white Cajun naval officer assigned a black bunkmate, the narrator tells the action through letters back to his landlocked wife in frequently clumsy, even purple prose, which muddies rather than enhances character. "So mine is not true loneliness, but closer to the love that saints feel for God: a sad and joyful longing. Like St. Teresa of Avila." Yet in the middle of this soggy saga of race guilt and accidental murder, there is a bracingly clear episode of pure action that reflects Mr. Dubus at his sturdiest. A sailor has dropped a high-explosive shell, bending the fuse pin and threatening the ship with catastrophe. A damage-control chief petty officer and his ensign defuse the shell with dry, direct movement that is a welcome relief from the fevers of the surrounding prose.

This disjunction between workaday action and finely embroidered sentiments is not to my taste. Yet Mr. Dubus's splintered vision can pay off handsomely. "Land Where My Fathers Died" is in effect a solid, somber murder thriller told from different points of view, set in a small Massachusetts town. Its hero, Archimedes Nionakis, is a second-generation Greek-American lawyer who, to save his skid row client, has to find the killer of a local doctor who specialized in exploiting fat and compulsively dieting women. Underneath his pretensions, Mr. Dubus is an action writer, laconic and exciting when he restrains his philosophic heavy breathing. Nionakis, who lives only to run in the annual Boston Marathon, could easily be the central figure in a series of genuinely offbeat detective fiction.

And, as if to confound criticism, Mr. Dubus's three-part novella "Molly," about a teen-age girl and her loving, permissive mother—both in a sense competing for life—is a stunner about the penalties and pride of consciously raising a child to sing her own distinctive song. "Molly" has many of Mr. Dubus's excesses of feeling and strained connections, yet it works because its emotional heartbeat is so insistently truthful.