[In the following review, Sullivan traces some of the common elements of Dubus's short fiction that appear in The Last Worthless Evening.]

In an age when short stories all too often mask human suffering with self-conscious cleverness, material clutter and bland irony, the short fiction of Andre Dubus is a tonic to the spirit. His characters usually feel their suffering, sound its depths, and talk about it, sometimes, expansively—and even share what they learn with the reader. They draw us directly into the burning center of their thoughts and feelings.

The Last Worthless Evening, Dubus' newest and perhaps finest collection of novellas and stories, has many of the elements his readers have come to admire since the publication of Separate Flights in 1975. Aching loss and disappointment are still dominant motifs; his characters are still lonely, ordinary middle-class people, most of them New Englanders or expatriate Southerners, many of them lapsed Catholics (although Dubus has Louisiana Cajun roots, he does not often write about the South); they suffer from insomnia, alcoholism, bad or broken marriages, and stultifying jobs.

In "Molly," the adolescent heroine sees in blue-collar children "some predetermined life, some boundary to their dreams, enclosed as tightly as their bodies were by their lawns and small houses." Teen-agers suffer "a dullness … sculpted by years of television, of parents who at meals and in the evenings had nothing to say to them, nothing to teach them." Molly's mother, who becomes a real estate agent after her husband deserts her, has plenty to teach, most of it disheartening. She has learned how much of themselves her clients "would give away for money or simply to avoid standing their ground … You could see in their eyes the cages they had built between their lives and their beliefs."

Yet the heroes in these stories have a way of breaking out of their cages. The mother summons a hidden "moral energy" and passes it on to her daughter to help her through her first sexual experience, even though by doing so she hastens Molly's growing up and leaving her. In earlier Dubus pieces, this sense of "a choice made with courage" was often not available. "Separate Flights," for example, features a similar mother/daughter scenario, with a bad rather than broken marriage as a backdrop, captured with a similar tenderness and exactness, but the story collapses into boozy self-pity, the mother denouncing the disappointment of love and marriage as a "farce" that "just happens" and "doesn't matter."

In this collection, love and marriage in America are still often a farce, but one that does matter, and characters continually resist, even if futilely the notion that life "just happens." The clearest exposition of the book's moral landscape is offered by the narrator of "Rose," who discovers each year, "with the awe of my boyhood, a part of the human spirit I had perhaps imagined, but had never seen or heard." In the narrator's grimmest but most inspiring story within a story, a young working-class woman who is so unhappy her heart has "ceased its signals to her" must suddenly defend her children against the murderous onslaught of her husband, a man who before going mad stares mutely at drying diapers "as if they were not cotton at all, but the whitest of white shades of the dead, come to haunt him, to assault him, an inch at a time, a foot, until they won, surrounded him where he stood in some corner of the bedroom, the bathroom, in the last place in the home that was his." The terrible violence that erupts in this story of entrapment is commensurate with the suppression that precedes it, and the mother pays an awful price for her action. But she does act, reentering "motherhood and the unity we must all gain against human suffering."

Since these stories have the rather unusual contemporary quality of being about something, and developing what they are about, it is easy to overlook their often quiet technique. Yet the book is full of magnificent writing. The descriptions of sexual initiation in "Molly" are both coarse and strangely beautiful; the dialogue of a genteel, condescending racist in "Deaths at Sea" ("The Southerner wants most of all to leave people alone … we know the Negrahs") is insidiously accurate; the descriptions of mental breakdown in "Rose," "After the Game," and "Dressed Like Summer Leaves" are terrifyingly precise; the portrait of compulsive female dieters and their hidden lives in "Land Where My Fathers Died" (an elaboration of Dubus' haunting earlier story "The Fat Girl") is heartrending.

That the obsessions of dieters is only a subsidiary motif in the latter story—which is basically about the arrogance of wealth and power—is characteristic of a new thematic richness in Dubus' work. Although he has said he writes stories rather than novels because he can deal with only one idea at a time, the longer pieces here are meditations on several inter-locking ideas. "Deaths at Sea," to cite another example, is a somber reflection on racial injustice, but it is also a meditation on the "true laughter," "true loneliness" and true friend-ship men experience at sea. Virtually every page in this collection plumbs unexpected depths, revealing another life being lived beneath a fragile surface.

"We like to believe that in this last quarter of the century, we know and are untouched by everything," says the narrator of "Rose," "yet it takes only a very small jolt, at the right time, to knock us off balance for the rest of our lives." Andre Dubus records these tiny, eternal jolts to our existence with unerring accuracy and eloquence, but the jolt he gives his readers is of another order. By confronting us with the way we live, or fail to live, he strikes at our moral passivity and complacency. In this period of gentrified fiction, that's a noble achievement.