Blurbs and pictures on the dustjackets of his books seem to tell it all. He looks like a teamster or a bearhunter: solid build, bushy beard, blue cap marked "Captain," jeans with a wide leather belt. He is a baseball addict, was a Marine for over five years, carries an axehandle in his car trunk and has a strong social conscience. He calls himself a "cradle-Catholic," often attends daily Mass, has been married three times and likes vodka with pepper grains. He gives salty interviews, writes careful prose, creates superb stories and shows unusual insight into women and boys in his fiction. He has been awarded Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, dislikes James Joyce and has published stories in such places as The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Harper's and The Sewanee Review. He is admired by Joyce Carol Oates and John Updike, has almost a cult following and yet is not well known.

Yet a biographical sketch of Andre Dubus would not be complete without one more detail. On July 23, 1986, while being a Good Samaritan to a man and a woman who had been involved in an accident on Route 53 north of Boston, Mr. Dubus was himself seriously injured and spent his fiftieth birthday in Massachusetts General Hospital comforted by his wife Peggy and their daughter Cadence. Supported by his family, his friends and his faith, he is determined to continue his creative writing and not allow himself to be daunted by any physical disability.

Born in Louisiana on Aug. 11, 1936, and living now in bluecollar Haverhill, Mass., Andre Dubus (pronounced Duhbeusse) has sprinkled bits of his past in his novels, short stories and novellas. He writes about boyhood in small Louisiana cities, life in the Marine Corps (on an aircraft carrier, a Pacific island and West Coast bases), graduate school in Iowa, and college teaching, marriage, children and "Ronnie D's" bar in the Merrimack Valley near Haverhill. Out of this material he has already gotten nine books: first a novel, The Lieutenant (1967), then four books of stories, Separate Flights (1975), Adultery & Other Choices (1977), Finding a Girl in America (1980), and The Times Are Never So Bad (1983). Each of these collections included a novella—Dubus's best form. And these four novellas, interrelated by recurring characters, were published together in his sixth book, We Don't Live Here Anymore (1984). The same year brought Dubus's superb Voices From the Moon, a well-reviewed novel that views the same events from six different perspectives. In 1984, he also published, in limited edition, Land Where My Fathers Died, a thirty-seven-page detective story of multiple perspective that also appeared in the magazine Antaeus. Dubus's ninth book, The Last Worthless Evening (1986), is a collection of six short stories and novellas.

What does he write about? The best answer, I suppose, is marriages—their relationships, tensions and adulteries—and families, especially the children. Dubus is a careful observer, and his perceptions of human feelings, attitudes and reactions are unusually acute. Furthermore, as an artist, he can communicate these perceptions through carefully invented characters, situations, events, dialogues and phrases. Take as an example this description of a thirty-six-year-old man visiting his young lover in "Going Under": "In her purple sweater and pants she is lovely, and he presses his face into her shoulder, her hair, he is squeezing her and her heels lift from the floor, then he kisses her and breathes from deep in her throat the scorched smell of dope. He looks at her green eyes: they are glazed and she is smiling, but it is a smile someone hung there: Miranda is someplace else."

Dubus's fiction tells about the hope of love and the lack of love and the death of love. His characters wish terribly for lifelong love but, to their sadness, rarely find it; rather, in Dubus's fiction as in American society, all too many marriages and families fail. "All adultery is a symptom," he writes, and in his best work he examines the illnesses of American marriages and families and the underlying "failures of the human heart." In Voices From the Moon, he even describes a shattered family trying to formulate their own stumbling explanations for their pain and loss: "The trouble was love," or "It's divorce that did it," or "She had outlived love." In other stories and novellas certain characters are even able to foresee the collapse of love. In "Separate Flights," Beth Harrison, who has long stopped loving her insurance-man husband, muses about her young daughter: "Now her seventeen-year-old, Peggy, was in love and she liked to talk about her plans, with this grownup tone in her voice, and there was nothing to do but listen to her, not as you listen to a child who wants to be a movie star, but to a child whose hope for friends or happiness is so strong yet futile that you know it will break her heart."

The divorced fathers, too, grieve for their lost marriages and wounded children. In "The Winter Father," Peter Jackman remembers: "He and Norma had hurt each other deeply, and their bodies had absorbed the pain…. Now fleshless they could talk by phone, even with warmth, perhaps alive from the time when their bodies were at ease together. He thought of having a huge house where he could live with his family, seeing Norma only at meals, shared for the children, he and Norma talking to David and Kathi; their own talk would be on extension phones in their separate wings: they would discuss the children, and details of running the house. This was of course the way they had finally lived, without the separate wings, the phones. And one of their justifications as they talked of divorce was that the children would be harmed, growing up in a house with parents who did not love each other, who rarely touched, and then by accident. There had been moments near the end when, brushing against each other in the kitchen, one of them would say: "Sorry." And, in a passage I find hard to forget, the same Peter Jackman, with rueful humor, epitomizes the awkwardness of the divorced father who has visitation-rights every Saturday: "He thought of owning a huge building to save divorced fathers. Free admission. A place of swimming pool, badminton and tennis courts, movie theaters, restaurants, soda fountains, batting cages, a zoo, an art gallery, a circus, aquarium, science museum, hundreds of restrooms, two always in sight, everything in the tender charge of women trained in first aid and Montessori, no uniforms, their only style warmth and cheer."

Dubus can also be harsh in his honesty. In the novella "We Don't Live Here Anymore," the narrator, Jack Linhart, is having an affair with his best friend's wife, Edith Allison. As they are lying together, Jack recalls an evening when he and his wife Terry were with the Allisons and two other couples: "Once at a party Terry was in the kitchen with Edith and two other wives. They came out grinning at the husbands: their own, the others. They had all admitted to shotgun weddings. That was four years ago and now one couple is divorced, another has made a separate peace, fishing and hunting for him and pottery and college for her; and there are the Allisons and the Linharts. A deckstacking example, but the only one I know." The Edith tells him a truth about her husband, her daughter, and herself: "He needs us, Sharon and me, but he can't really love anyone, only his work, and the rest is surface."

"I don't believe that."

"I don't mean his friendship with you. Of course it's deep, he doesn't live with you, and best of all you're a man, you don't have those needs he can't be bothered with. He'd give you a kidney if you needed one."

"He'd give it to you too."

"Of course he would. But he wouldn't go to a marriage counselor."

It is with such harsh honesty, as well as with strong, sexually explicit language and a spare prose style, that Dubus avoids sentimentality. As a writer he has developed a distinctive voice: long clear sentences (usually compounds), vivid detail for physical objects, accurate description of human emotions and reactions, and understated, smoothly flowing sentences at moments of intensity. His language is generally simple and direct, but for accuracy he is willing to use the unusual or formal word: "impuissant," "misogamist," "Faustian." Though he occasionally uses humor and irony, his voice is usually serious, emotionally powerful and simultaneously sympathetic to, but distant from, his characters. His narration is calm, his dialogue good, his words carefully chosen and edited. At his best, writes Joyce Carol Oates, Dubus creates novellas that are "triumphs of voice"—a voice of style that has the quality of "unhurried precision."

Even Dubus's metaphors, though original and effective, have a certain dispassion to them: "Like a cat with corpses, [my wife] brings me gifts I don't want"; "His marriage was falling slowly, like a feather"; "He feels they are not at a hearth but are huddled at a campfire in a dangerous forest." In one short story, "The Pitcher," an unfaithful wife effectively uses the metaphor of her baseball-player husband as she tells him, "All summer I've been feeling like I was running alongside the players' bus waving at you. Then he came along."

Dubus often adds breadth and perspective by putting his individuals or families in some larger social, literary or religious framework. Some characters come out of themselves by meeting friends at Timmy's Bar; others look to books or plants or records (classical by day, jazz at night). Dubus's Marines find models of bravery in Corps legends, especially the heroes of the Chosin Reservoir. Some characters worry about friends or brothers serving in Vietnam; others feel concern for the blacks in the South or the poor on the streets of New York City. Another man in Voices From the Moon, the owner of two ice-cream stores, has an effective social conscience: he "was good to his workers" and "did not keep them working so few hours a week that he could pay them under the minimum wage"; he was even "planning a way for all workers, above their salaries, to share in the profits, and was working on a four-day week for his daily and nightly managers, because he believed they should be with their young families." (This was a man who had fallen in love with his son's ex-wife. Dubus's moral universe is never a simple one.)

Dubus also broadens his fiction's scope by literary allusions. He quotes a passage from Conrad's Heart of Darkness, takes a title from St. Thomas More (The Times Are Never So Bad), and at various moments refers to, or echoes, such writers as Conrad (Lord Jim), Hopkins, Hemingway, Balzac, Tolstoy, Shakespeare, Kipling, Faulkner, Zola, Kate Chopin, Rhys, Colette, de Maupassant, even Joyce, as well as his great literary hero and teacher, Chekhov. For a writer who is at heart a realist, he makes surprisingly frequent use of Greek myth: one man, lying with his love in his arms, "kisses her until she warmly wakes and encircles him with her squeezing arms; he ascends; he is Prometheus; and he pauses in his passion to gently kiss her brightened eyes." Andromache, Oedipus and Icarus make their appearances, and in a celebration of fidelity Dubus uses Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love and fertility, to comment on contemporary America. Musing about his friend Jack Linhart, who has stayed married despite mutual infidelities, Hank Allison thinks, "Jack is right. He's glad now they stuck it out. He and Terry. He said I've got a good friend who's also my wife and I've got two good children, and the three of them make the house a good nest, and I sit and look out the window at the parade going by: some of my students are marching and some of my buddies, men and women, and the drum majorette is Aphrodite … and she's leading that parade to some bad place. I don't think it's the Styx either. It's … some big open field with brown grass and not one tree, and nobody's going to say anything funny there. Nobody'll laugh. All you'll hear is pants and grunts. Maybe Aphrodite will laugh, I don't know. But I don't think she's that mean…."

Far more than to society, literature, or mythology, though, Dubus looks to Catholic belief and practice to broaden the perspectives and expand the framework of his fiction. Sometimes it is an occasional "O Jesus" or "Dear Jesus"; sometimes his characters pray or go to Mass or talk about "Holy Saturday"; sometimes there is a religious allusion in a Dubus title—"Contrition," "Bless Me, Father," "Sorrowful Mysteries," Other characters wonder about God's absence, like the wife who had lost her own faith during college and, thinking about her husband, "did not know whether Lee believed or not. She could not remember ever talking about God to him." There are priests and brothers in his stories, too, most of them good men and wise counselors. Many of Dubus's fictional boys go to Catholic schools (he, himself, attended a Christian Brothers' high school, where he wrote his first stories), and one young boy finds God through guilt: Having almost drowned a young cat, he "looked up into the rain at God." This does not stop the boy, though, from killing the cat the next morning.

As a moralist, Dubus values fidelity, truth, justice and innocence even as he vividly records the failures of marriage and family. His characters sometimes interpret their actions in terms of morality, and one or two of his people go through a process of moral reasoning in the pages of his stories (a dangerous practice for a storyteller, but Dubus keeps it under control). He will even try to redefine a moral term, to make clear that fidelity in marriage involves far more than sexual fidelity. This he does in "The Pitcher," as a wife talks to her baseball-player husband:

"It wasn't the road trips. It was when you were home: you weren't here. You weren't here, with me."

"I was here all day…. And all those times on the road I never went near a whorehouse."

"It's not the same."

Dubus also has a strong sense of the sacraments. His characters go to confession or to Mass—folk Masses, parish Masses, quiet weekday Masses. For one character, the Eucharist is a way to avoid loneliness, for another, a way to praise God, for a third, "The Eucharist is the sacrament of love and I needed it very badly those five years" during a bad marriage. And young Richie Stowe himself, in Voices From the Moon, wants to become a priest, even as, at book's end, he first experiences the appeal of the hair and arms and hand-touch of young Melissa Donnelly.

More originally, some characters manifest what might be called a "religious imagination," as they use some religious framework or story or phrase to interpret their own experiences or someone else's situation. One young white man from southern Louisiana reads of a black man, Sonny Broussard, who is to be executed for rape and sees his condemnation and death as parallel with Christ's. In another story a suburban housewife, though she has lost her faith, still "tried to pray. She wanted to fall in love with God…. Cleaning the house would be an act of forgiveness and patience under His warm eyes." One fifty-four-year-old father comes to love his daughter more in her weakness than in her strength, and realizes that here he resembles God, who loves us humans in our very weakness. And young Richie Stowe from Voices, almost thirteen and a daily Mass-goer, "felt always in God's eye," "knew God saw and loved those who suffered, yet still saw and loved him," and was certain that Christ had been in him when he finally forgave his parents for their divorce: "Everyone had to bear a Cross as Christ did…. Two years ago his mother moved out and then they were divorced and he [Richie] carried that one, got himself nailed to it, hung there in pain and the final despair and then released himself, commended his will and spirit to God, and something in him died—he did not know what—but afterward, like Christ on Easter, he rose again, could love his days again, and the people in them, and he forgave his parents, and himself too for having despaired of them."

These perspectives expand the world of Dubus's fiction and, together with his spare style, help to control the intensity of emotion and sentiment in his work. But, I should make clear, Dubus is not primarily a novelist of society or literary allusion or religion. His focus is always on his wounded people, with their complex lives and motives, their infidelities and violence and adulteries and "demons," and their unspoken hopes for forgiveness and goodness. Like Virgil, Dubus knows the lachrymae rerum—the tears evoked by human experience—and he unfailingly treats his characters with immense and deep compassion.

One more thing should be said: Andre Dubus is a careful artist and craftsman. He loves to write prose; he writes every day on a regular schedule, and lets his story "gestate for a long, long time." He never does an outline, and "usually begins with a 'what if.' An idea just comes to me." At that point he needs to know many details about his characters: "I make note of things that may never get into the story. I want to know if they believe in God; if so, do they belong to an organized religion? Ever since the Surgeon General's report on smoking I've thought it was important to know whether or not a character smoked, because it said something about a character … I make notes on the age, the family. The hardest part is to get the characters' employment. I have to find them a job, and then I have to find out something about the job." And when he is ready to write, he writes with great care. Once happy to produce one thousand words a day, he is now content with one hundred. Interestingly, he tapes all of his prose before completing it, testing his word-choice and sentence-rhythms by hearing as well as by seeing. Only then is he prepared to publish.