Gone So Long
“Dubus (Townie) renders this story of love, jealousy, guilt, and atonement in a voice that rings with authenticity and evokes the texture of working-class lives . . . This is a compassionate and wonderful novel.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review
“Dubus is in his gritty wheelhouse, exploring the question of how we live with our mistakes and whether we can ever stop adding to them.” —Kirkus Reviews
Gone So Long, Andre Dubus III’s first novel in a decade, opens with this description of Daniel Ahearn, as written by his middle-aged daughter Susan, a writer struggling to find her true story and a woman struggling to find stability in her life. The description is part of Susan’s new writing project, which brings her into her traumatic past even as her present threatens her with further upheaval. Susan recalls the last time she saw her father, nearly two decades ago, watching him unnoticed from a diner across the street from his parole officer’s office in Lawrence, Massachusetts. The time before that, she was three years old, being ripped from his arms by the police following a shocking act of impulsive violence on his part.
Daniel now lives a quiet, solitary existence in a seaside New England town close to where he grew up and where Susan was born. Susan lives in Florida, where she was raised by her maternal grandmother, Lois. Daniel has kept himself away from her for decades, under threat from Lois, and from his own desire to avoid bringing up old trauma for Susan. At age sixty-four, though, with his health failing, he’s driven to see his daughter one last time. He writes her a long letter and starts driving south down the coast to see her.
Susan, meanwhile, still suffers from the trauma of a night she doesn’t remember. At forty-three, she feels unsettled: she’s married to a good man but struggles to feel she loves him; she teaches at a college, but as an adjunct who has taken the semester off; she writes in fits and starts but has trouble believing in a project enough to see it through. She decides to take some time away from her husband to immerse herself in her writing at her childhood home, where her grandmother Lois still lives. Meanwhile, Lois must face her own demons and the anger, bitterness, and fear that we can’t seem to escape and also won’t stop hiding from Susan. As Daniel, Susan, and Lois dance with their darkest thoughts, they slowly move toward an inevitable confrontation, one with unintended consequences.
In Gone So Long Andre Dubus III asks us to consider how our history continues to shape our present, be it family history or the history of a place and time, marked by class and gender. Few writers can enter their characters so completely or evoke their lives as viscerally. Cathartic, affirming, and steeped in the empathy and precise observations of character for which Dubus is celebrated, Gone So Long explores how the wounds of the past afflict the people we become, and probes the limits of recovery and absolution.
