The deluge of recent punditry--in both good faith and bad--on the plight of the working class can make it easy to forget the power of stories to reveal their lives. But in Such Kindness, novelist Andre Dubus III (Dirty Love; Townie) dramatizes working-class suffering with a detailed first-person perspective--and does so without the simplifications of a political mold. Though New England homebuilder Tom Lowe was living well--with a good wife, a healthy son, and a beautiful home he had the painful pleasure of building--the water was at his head. The price for this home was a steep mortgage, his body ached from constant physical labor, and his emotional withdrawal and obsessive work ethic stood between him and his wife and son. Then Lowe falls from a third-story roof, mangling his hips. The loss of work, crippling pain ("I have spent many hours contemplating pain"), opioid addiction, foreclosure, divorce, alcohol addiction, poverty, and the contempt of his son deny him his comforts, dignity, and reasons for living.
With tender, masculine prose in the tradition of post-war American realism--with a dash of 19th-century novelistic social criticism--Such Kindness is the story of a working man's rock bottom and resurfacing. --Walker Minot, writer and editor