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In July of 1986, Andre Dubus stopped to help a motorist on the side of a Massachusetts highway and was himself struck by a passing car, costing him one leg and the use of the other. To anyone familiar with his fiction, the accident was uncanny. Dubus (pronounced dub-yoose), a Catholic writer from the South, had made a career from telling stories in which characters experience various accidents that force a self-reckoning. He could have scripted this one himself. But Dubus was not like his characters—men and women who have grown spiritually numb and are in desperate need of a wake-up call. Dubus was already wide awake and attuned to the spiritual significance of the physical world. He had, in a sense, already thought through the implications of such a life-changing accident—he did not need it to actually happen to him.

But it did happen. And it changed him—in ways he could not have predicted. While Dubus had always made his characters face challenges, provoking them from passivity to activity in order to achieve redemption, the challenge posed by his crippling accident led him in nearly the opposite direction. The strong and vital man who had always defined himself by action learned in a much deeper way the action of receiving.

Dubus has been described both as a man's man and a writer's writer. A kind of Catholic Hemingway, he wrote muscular prose that is "lathed to perfection," as one critic observed; in his stories, meaning is fused almost imperceptibly to action. Dubus was born in 1936 in Lake Charles, Louisiana, and he went to Catholic school in Lafayette, the heart of Cajun country. In a culture known for aggressive and "manly" men, he experienced a conventional boyhood of hunting, baseball, coming-of-age challenges, and the felt need to prove himself to his father. It was partly to please his father that he entered the Marine Corps Platoon Leaders Class at Quantico, Virginia, at age 19, and that he later served as a Marine captain. Though he confessed to being too much led by his father in joining the corps, he never saw the decision as a bad one. His experiences shaped him as a writer, as is clear especially in his Paul Clement stories.

Typical of Dubus' work in the 1960s and 1970s, the Paul Clement stories explore the silent terrain of the relationship between father and son, and the unspoken tests of manhood—almost always defined by activity—that become a rite of passage. For example, in "Cadence," Paul faces a difficult sergeant who nearly crushes his spirit during basic training. Just at the point when Paul feels that his body will betray him, he "regains possession" of his legs and finishes the course, triumphant. Paul's rite of passage has a high moral cost in this story, as he betrays his friend Munson (who cannot finish the course) in order to join the corps of men. Yet the betrayal that reveals Paul's moral weakness does not render the test of manhood invalid. As he takes his place among the other men of the corps, he reflects on his past—the job digging trenches that his father had got him when he was sixteen. It was the first real physical challenge he had ever faced: the sun's heat and the backbreaking labor brought him to the point of exhaustion and nausea, and he wanted only to go home. But when his father arrived and took him to buy a pith helmet, he found the strength to stay on the job and earned the silent respect and pride of his father.

Dubus' Paul Clement stories are as autobiographical as Hemingway's Nick Adams stories. Readers would later discover in Dubus' essay "Digging" that Paul's memory of the trenches is Dubus' own. Because he and his father could not really talk to each other, this test of manual labor passes between them as a kind of spiritual gift from father to son. The gift is the opportunity to attain manhood, and the older Dubus reflects that "it is time to thank my father for wanting me to work and telling me I had to work and getting the job for me and buying me lunch and a pith helmet instead of taking me home to my mother and sister." If he had quit, Dubus writes, "he would have spent the summer at home, nestled in the love of two women, peering at my father's face, and yearning to be someone I respected, a varsity second baseman, a halfback … yearning to be a man among men, and that is where my father sent me with a helmet on my head." "Going home" to the women would have been to settle for passivity, to consign oneself to a world of yearning instead of a world of action.

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