Andre Dubus has published two novels and four novellas, but his growing reputation rests most securely on his short stories. Those stories may, with some qualifications, be divided into three groups, based upon the way in which the stories are structured: closely related to structure, characterization is handled differently in each of the three types of stories.

In the first of these groups, the stories limit themselves to what Henry James called "the detached incident." Narration is straightforward. We begin at one point in time and move ahead until the incident that gives the story its life has finished taking place. Characterization depends solely upon the characters' responses to the incident in question. In Dubus's work, "The Doctor" and "The Dark Men" best exemplify this type of story.

The stories in the second group have no clearly defined beginning or end. The thread of the narrative may spin itself first one way, then, another. In the most characteristic of these stories, Dubus relinquishes purely narrative interest, giving away the outcome of events in the first few lines. The focus is not on what is going to happen to the characters; it is instead on what has happened to them, on what has made them the people they are. The narrative assumes the shape of a circle. Examples of stories in this group are "Townies" and "In My Life."

The majority of Dubus's short fiction falls into the third category. Most of the stories in this group are compressed novels. Several years, or even several decades, of a character's life may be packed into one tight paragraph. However, the same might be said of stories in the previous group. But the stories in the third class differ from those in the second in two important respects. First, they tend to be much longer, and the extra room allows a heavier reliance on scene—as opposed to summary—than a shorter story does. Second, whereas the stories in the second group have no recognizable beginning or end, the stories in the third group do. They are narratives in a more conventional sense. We are led to believe that something important is going to happen to the characters; and while we do examine their pasts, we also see them responding to events in the fictional present. Notable stories in this group are "Separate Flights" and "The Fat Girl."

"The Doctor," in the collection Separate Flights, illustrates Dubus's ability to draw characterization from the isolated occurrence. The story is brief, about 2500 words; it has a simple plot. Art Castagnetto, an obstetrician who lives in a rural community near Boston, goes jogging one quiet Sunday morning and encounters disaster along the way. A slab of concrete has tumbled off the edge of a bridge and trapped a child beneath the shallow waters of a brook. While Art struggles vainly to lift the slab, the child drowns. The following morning, troubled by a vague but nagging memory, Art returns to the scene of the accident and makes a discovery: in the yard of the house that stands near the bridge lies a coiled garden hose; had he cut off a piece of the hose and placed one end of it in the child's mouth, the child would have been able to breathe until the slab could be lifted. He walks home, takes his pocketknife out, cuts a section out of his own garden hose, and places it in the trunk of his car.

Through careful use of detail, Dubus sets the scene for the tragedy that will, in one small way, change Art forever. The morning on which the accident occurs has signaled the beginning of spring. He has put away his sweat suit, preferring to jog in shorts and tee-shirt. Running down the road, he enjoys the freshness of the morning, breathing "the scent of pines and, he believed, the sunlight in the air." The brook, frozen all winter, has now begun to run clearly. The sights of the first warm Sunday of the year are all welcome: a mile or so past the bridge, he sees a family sitting at their picnic table reading the paper; a bit farther he sees a young couple washing a Volkswagen, and they look at him and wave. "All up the road it was like that: people cleaning their lawns, washing cars, some just sitting under the bright sky; one large bald man lifted a beer can and grinned."

When Art turns and starts home, the peaceful morning is suddenly cracked open: "Then something was wrong—he felt it before he knew it. When the boys ran up from the brook into his vision, he started sprinting and had a grateful instant when he felt the strength left in his legs, though still he didn't know if there was any reason for strength and speed." At the bridge, he finds the child and fights to free him. As his efforts fail, a sense of incredulity overcomes him. That such a morning could be torn by tragedy seems unthinkable: "He refused to believe it was this simple and this impossible." Yet his strength is not enough. The morning turns ugly:

The sky changed, was shattered by a smoke-gray sound of winter nights—the fire horn—and in the quiet that followed he heard a woman's voice…. He turned and looked at her standing beside him in the water, and he suddenly wanted to be held, his breast against hers, but her eyes shrieked at him to do something, and he bent over and tried again to lift the slab. Then she was beside him, and they kept trying until ten minutes later, when four volunteer firemen descended out of the dying groan of the siren and splashed into the brook.

Art returns home and drinks all afternoon. Sitting in his backyard with his wife, he suddenly begins to cry. The next moming "an answer—or at least a possibility—was waiting for him, as though it had actually chosen to enter his mind now, with the buzzing of the alarm clock." He rises, walks down the road, sees the garden hose lying near the scene of the accident, then goes back home, cuts a section out of his own garden hose and places it in the trunk of his Buick. The story's concluding sentence nicely sums up what seems to be Art's dominant character trait; it also indicates the child's death will have a long-lasting effect on the doctor. "His fingers were trembling as he lowered the piece of hose and placed it beside his first-aid kit, in front of a bucket of sand and a small snow shovel he had carried all through the winter." Objects for use in routine emergencies fill the trunk of Art's car. But, whereas a scraped knee or an automobile halted by snow might be considered routine, death by drowning, in a shallow brook on a perfect morning, is anything but routine. The addition of the hose is an attempt to insure preparation for the once-in-a-lifetime crisis. Yet the experience has been so shattering for Art—who prides himself on being prepared—that it is unlikely he can ever again consider himself truly ready for all eventualities.

"The Dark Men," a story from Finding a Girl in America, is about an Office of Naval Intelligence investigation of Commander Joe Saldi, a Naval pilot currently stationed aboard a carrier. Saldi's friend and superior officer, Captain Deveraux, is visited by two ONI investigators, who acquaint him with Saldi's guilt (though Deveraux refuses to let them tell him exactly what Saldi is guilty of) and ask to see the pilot. Deveraux stalls long enough for Saldi, who as yet knows nothing of the investigation and is planning to go ashore, to leave the ship; then he tells the ONI men they will have to come back that night. Later the captain goes ashore himself, has Saldi located and brought to a bar. There the captain tells his friend of the investigation. That afternoon, when the ONI men return to the ship and ask for Saldi, Deveraux informs them that Saldi, in an apparent suicide, has taken his plane and flown out to sea. There has been no radio contact for more than an hour.

Deveraux feels animosity, if not outright hatred, for the ONI men. He is conscious of the contrast in appearance between himself and Saldi, on the one hand, and the ONI men on the other. Both Saldi and Deveraux spend time outside, in the sun, and their faces are healthy; they both wear Navy whites and openly display insignia of rank, as well as campaign ribbons, on their uniforms. Everything about the ONI men, in contrast, suggests blankness, anonymity: "Their faces were drained of color, they were men who worked away from the sun." They wear dark civilian clothes, and the captain feels that their dress defies him: "They were from the Office of Naval Intelligence … and although they called him Captain and Sir, they denied or outmaneuvered his shoulder boards by refusing to wear their own." The ONI men look "for the dark sides of other men."

Just as the last scene of "The Doctor" draws all the elements of that story together to form a single, clear impression of character, so does the concluding scene of "The Dark Men." Having already learned of his friend's final action, Captain Deveraux walks the flight deck, waiting for the return of the ONI men, Foster and Todd:

When they emerged from the island and moved toward him, walking abreast and leaning into the wind, he was standing at the end of the flight deck. He saw them coming and looked away. The sun was going down. Out there, toward the open sea, a swath of gold lay on the water. When they stopped behind him he did not turn around. He was thinking that, from a distance, a plane flying into the sunset looks like a moving star. Then shutting his eyes he saw the diving silver plane in the sunset, and then he was in it, his heart pounding with the dive, and the engine roaring in his blood, and he saw the low red sun out of the cockpit and, waiting, the hard and yielding sea.

"Commander Saldi is not here," he said.

"Not here?" It was Foster. "Where is he?"

"Out there."

Saldi's suicide is a slap in the blank faces of the ONI men. Deveraux's complicity in the affair allows him to share responsibility for the act of defiance. When he envisions the plane diving, streaking toward the sea, he manages to share further in the act of defiance by imagining himself in the cockpit.

Both "The Dark Men" and "The Doctor" render the detached incident vividly and invest it with significance. The narration in both stories is straightforward; there are no flashbacks. The scenic method is relied on almost exclusively in both stories. What we know about the characters, we know because of their responses to a single situation.

While narration is straightforward in those stories, it is anything but that in the stories that fall into the second group. "In My Life" is the story of a white woman, the first-person narrator, who has been raped by a black man named Sonny Broussard. The story both begins and ends with Broussard's execution. Sandwiched in between the beginning and the ending are the rape itself, an account of the narrator's failed marriage, and affairs with three different men. The story is only about 2500 words long. It can cover so much ground only because Dubus makes very effective use of summary.

In the following passage, the first four sentences summarize the narrator's marriage. The transitional phrase "one morning" signals the beginning of the scene in which the marriage actually ends:

It seems after you get to be twenty-five there's nothing but married men. I was married when I was eighteen, we had to, but I miscarried, and inside of two years I couldn't stand the sight of him. His name was Brumby, and I came to hate that name, and I would pronounce it hating. I'd say, "Okay, Brumby." One morning I woke up and he was gone. I went in the kitchen and there was a note on the table, with the salt shaker resting on it. I was grinning when I picked it up. It said: I'm sorry, I'll send money. Brumby. I laughed, I was so glad he finally took it on himself to leave.

The night of Broussard's execution is a temporal base that keeps Jill from seeming a disembodied voice wandering through events. Thoughts of the execution continually intrude, forcing themselves into Jill's consciousness and the narrative. All other events, even though they precede the execution, are viewed in light of it. The circular form allows the central event to remain dominant throughout. Dubus's skillful use of summary enables us to form a surprisingly complete impression of Jill's life—thus, the title of the story.

A story similar in design is "Townies." The first section of the story begins when an elderly security guard at a small college finds the body of a murdered coed lying on a snowy bridge one night. Instead of phoning the police or the ambulance, he kneels and strokes her cheek, his mind drifting back to the many times in his life when he looked at other coeds, young and attractive, and wondered what it would feel like to touch one of them. The series of flashbacks is framed by the old man's kneeling and touching the murdered girl. The section ends right where it began.

Section two begins with a man named Mike following a girl across campus. He overtakes her on the footbridge and, in a brutal scene, beats her to death. As he walks away after the murder, he too recalls incidents involving various coeds from the college. Like the security guard, Mike is a townie, but an unemployed one: he lives off the coeds that he manages to lure into sexual relationships. The dead girl was the most recent of his lovers.

Perhaps more than any other story Dubus has written, "Townies" renounces all purely narrative interest. The coed's death is divulged early, in the opening paragraph of section one; section two, which actually precedes section one chronologically, does not lead up to the girl's death but begins with it. What maintains interest is Dubus's deft examination of character. Each section probes a townie's response to the constant presence of the coeds.

The security guard's life in the town has been one of muted desire. He recalls, for example, a time when as a young man he saw a group of the girls standing on a street corner waiting for the bus to Boston:

It was a winter day. When he saw them waiting for the bus he crossed the street so he could walk near them. There were perhaps six of them. As he approached, he looked at their faces, their hair. They did not look at him. He walked by them. He could smell them and he could feel their eyes seeing him and not seeing him. Their smells were of perfume, cold fur, leather gloves, leather suitcases. Their voices had no accents he could recognize. They seemed the voices of mansions, resorts, travel. He was too conscious of himself to hear what they were saying. He knew it was idle talk; but its tone seemed peremptory; he would not have been surprised if one of them had given him a command. Then he was away from them. He smelled only the cold air now; he longed for their smells again: erotic, unattainable, a world that would never be open to him. But he did not think about its availability, any more than he would wish for an African safari.

Recognizing that they come from a different world, the security guard has always remained passive around the coeds. His first active response to their presence only occurs when he reaches out and strokes the cheek of the girl Mike has murdered.

It is ironic that Mike, who cares nothing for the girls, is able to have them at will. They are his meal tickets. He accepts money when they offer it; when they don't offer it, he steals it. Whereas the security guard has always been so keenly aware of the sight and smell of the girls, Mike is aware of what they own—their expensive clothes, their stereos, their Volvos. He hasn't limited himself to the girls: for twenty-five dollars he once agreed to go to bed with "the one college fag, a smooth-shaven, razor-cut boy who dressed better than the girls." The next morning he woke, looked at the young man's face, and wanted to kill him.

Mike's responses are all angry, and they all result from greed. The murder he finally commits results not from his anguish at losing a lover but from the bitterness he feels at losing the right to sleep in Robin's comfortable room, to spend her money and drink her liquor.

"Townies" is about closed worlds. Though Mike manages to work his way into the girls' beds, he no more fits into their world than the security guard would. It seems natural for the narrative to form a complete circle: just as the story ends where it begins, so does the life of a townie.

The stories in the third group are not so quick to relinquish the power of suspense. None of the stories has a complicated plot, yet Dubus does work to elicit concern for what is going to happen to the characters. While he examines the characters' pasts, just as he does in a story like "Townies," he also presents an ongoing action. The result is a group of compressed novels.

One of Dubus's finest stories is "Separate Flights," the title story in his first collection. Beth Harrison is a forty-nine-year-old grandmother who smokes too much, drinks too much, can't sleep, and has stopped believing in love. Her youngest daughter, Peggy, will soon be leaving their home in Iowa to attend a New England college. Facing the fact that in September she will be left alone with her husband Lee—whom she despises—Beth increases her drinking, and her frustration grows more intense.

The symbol of Beth's isolation is the separate flight. Whenever she accompanies Lee to a convention, he insists on their taking separate flights, so that if one plane crashes, Peggy will still have one parent left. But to Beth, this only means that she might die alone, among strangers. On one such flight, she meets a silversmith and toys with the idea of going to bed with him during their layover in Chicago, but nothing comes of it. For weeks after the flight, she lies in bed beside her husband and masturbates, tantalized at the thought of his catching her. As her life slides further out of control, Beth concludes that her best friend, for the rest of her life, will probably be booze.

In "Separate Flights," the narrative is tightly bound by Beth's perceptions. We see only what she sees. When Beth observes her daughter at a cookout, the description is filtered through her consciousness: "Then she looked to her right, at Peggy, her blue eyes made brighter by contact lenses, her cheek concave as she drew on a cigarette, faint downy hair on her face catching the sunlight." When Beth walks into the living room late one night and, flipping on the light, discovers Peggy making love to her boyfriend Bucky, she sees "Peggy's face hidden inside the dress she was shrugging into, and Bucky with his naked back turned, snapping trousers at the waist." The author of a work of fiction is never really absent from his story, but Dubus makes himself seem so throughout "Separate Flights." The strict third-person limited point-of-view forces us to share Beth's perspective, to feel the impact events have on her.

Flashbacks are an important tool in this story. They work well here chiefly because they are so skillfully woven into the narrative. An especially subtle transition occurs after a flashback that begins while Beth is talking with Robert Carini, the silversmith, on the plane. As she talks, she gazes out the window into "clouds so thick she couldn't see the wing behind her." The flashback begins in the middle of their conversation, takes us back to the airport lounge, where, waiting to board the flight, Beth has two drinks. When she gets on the plane, she meets Carini. They begin talking, and Beth soon finds herself revealing the facts of her stale life to the stranger, telling him things she has told no one else. The conversation she and Carini have at the end of the flashback overlaps the conversation that was taking place when the flashback began. We only realize the flashback has ended when we read "she was watching Robert's face; he suddenly squinted and she turned to the window: they had broken through the clouds into a glaring sky that was blue and clear as far ahead as she could see." The transition is effortless. The flashbacks in "Separate Flights" are all handled with the same ease. They provide brief but illuminating glimpses of Beth's past without disrupting the narrative flow.

Flashbacks are not such an important tool in "The Fat Girl," from Adultery & Other Choices. This story covers a period of seventeen years in the life of a fat girl named Louise, focusing on her battle against chocolate bars and peanut butter. As a child, Louise eats little at meals, and no one can figure out why she keeps growing. But Louise knows: she grows because of the four, five, or six chocolate bars she eats each night, she grows because of the peanut butter sandwiches she tucks under her shirt and slips up to her room. She continues to grow until her senior year at college, when her roommate Carrie talks her into dieting. That year she loses seventy pounds. She meets and marries a handsome lawyer, for whom she cooks lavish meals each night while starving herself to stay thin. But when she becomes pregnant, she rediscovers the joy of overeating and decides that her identity is bound to obesity, that being Louise means letting her appetite reign. Gluttony is her favorite thing.

Dubus uses summary passages extensively in "The Fat Girl." One advantage of summary is that when it is employed properly, it facilitates the passing of time. Dubus's summaries work well because they are full of concrete details:

It started when Louise was nine. You must start watching what you eat, her mother would say…. The two of them would eat bare lunches, while her older brother ate sandwiches and potato chips, and then her mother would sit smoking while Louise eyed the bread box, the pantry, the refrigerator. Wasn't that good, her mother would say. In five years you'll be in high school and if you're fat the boys won't like you; they won't ask you out. Boys were as far away as five years, and she would go to her room and wait for nearly an hour until she knew her mother was no longer thinking of her, then she would creep into the kitchen and, listening to her mother talking on the telephone, or her footsteps upstairs, she would open the breadbox, the pantry, the jar of peanut butter. She would put the sandwich under her shirt and go outside or to the bathroom and eat it.

Louise eats, time passes—and we see how far back the roots of her secret passion reach. Such passages help Dubus develop his character quickly.

He does not, however, rely exclusively on summary. There are several scenes which draw us closer for greater intensity. When Carrie asks Louise to diet, for instance, we move out of a summary passage into a brief but effective scene. When, near the end of the story, Louise and her husband Richard argue about the weight she has put on, there is again a scene. Dubus's sense of selection here is infallible.

The compressed novel seems to be the ideal form for Dubus. It allows him to probe more deeply into the characters than a story limiting itself to the detached incident can, and it allows him to forge a dramatic narrative, something the shorter, "formless" stories do not do.

A few of Dubus's stories do not fit neatly into any of the three groups. For instance, "Delivering," from Finding a Girl in America, focuses on a single incident—a woman's leaving her husband and sons—but Dubus uses flashbacks to fill in information about the characters' pasts. "Andromache," from Adultery & Other Choices, is a circular narrative—we learn in the opening paragraph that the protagonist's husband has been killed in a plane wreck, then 7500 words later we return to virtually the same point—but it differs from "In My Life" and "Townies" in that, after delving into the past, the narrative moves back toward the fictional present in a basically straightforward fashion.

Dubus's reputation is deservedly growing: his most recent collection, The Times Are Never So Bad, received enthusiastic reviews in such publications as Newsweek, Vanity Fair, and The New York Times Book Review. Even those reviewers who have praised Dubus's work, though, while duly noting his ability to draw fully realized, complex characters, have tended to ignore the more technical aspects of his fiction. But it is precisely his mastery of narrative technique that enables him to convey his insight into character.