Andre Dubus, the great short story writer, would have been 79 years old today. I can't recall exactly why, a few years ago, I picked up a copy of his Selected Stories. It proved one of those books that fell apart from frequent use: Read over and over, passed along to friends, coffee and whiskey spilled on pages, tobacco smudged in the margins. Eventually I gathered all of his individual collections of novellas and stories, and his two books of essays, too. There are few writers who mean more to me.
Dubus's prose was lean and elegant, and had a rhythm and musicality that came from the attention he paid to how it sounded when read aloud. He possessed a gift for the striking phrase or paragraph, those lines that are encountered with all the force of revelation. Consider this passage from his short story, "A Father's Story," about the meaning of rituals â?? in this case, the Catholic Mass:
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