Dancing after Hours.

Readers familiar with the work Andre Dubus has been producing over the last thirty years will be gratified by this new collection of stories. Here in abundance are all the distinctive qualities which have established Dubus's reputation as one of the best short-story writers now working in America.

As in most of his work, the stories in this new collection are mostly set in gritty, North-of-Boston, rural and small-town landscapes. His characters follow their workaday routines and pursue their habitual pleasures in inelegant, but carefully drawn public locales--ballparks, roadhouses, modest restaurants, coffee shops, convenience stores, and plain offices. They do their loving and fighting and nurturing in ordinary middle-class living rooms, bedrooms, and kitchens. Their joys and sorrows are described for the most part in a simple, direct prose which keeps our attention firmly on the subject of the story rather than on the means of its telling. (Only slightly more often now does the older Dubus allow his disciplined, objective voice to mount toward a lovely, restrained lyricism.) And, most importantly, the characters in Dancing after Hours remain deeply felt and richly described.

Dubus's characters present an immensely refreshing counter-image to the more familiar contemporary picture of cool, amoral, postmodernist anomie. His men and women are no less sexually promiscuous than those of any other contemporary writer, and they therefore no less often find themselves alone, remote from former spouses and family members. The difference is in the emotional quality of their response to these unions and separations. Dubus's characters love fully and grieve fully. In the story "All the Time in the World," we feel a young woman's joyful sense of possibility as she sits at lunch and anticipates a shared life with a man who loves her: "She was hungry, and she talked with her friends and waited for her steak, and for all that was coming to her: from her body, from the earth, from radiant angels poised in the air she breathed." In "Love Song," a divorced woman continues stoically to mourn her departed husband as she devotes herself to raising two doughters: "the earth itself was leaving with her sad and pitying husband, was drawing away from her....She never again perceived time as she had before."

Human affection, simply stated, is Dubus's primary subject. Like D.H. Lawrence, he immerses his readers in the strong, and sometimes volatile, currents of his characters' deepest emotional and erotic attachments. Much suffering and occasional violence is the result, but also much tenderness, resilience, and considerable joy. The divorced parents, second husbands, third wives, and the many members of intact families who populate Dubus's fiction are almost all capable of connecting intensely to one another. It is these connections which give their lives focus and meaning--as in the story "Woman on a Plane," where a sister senses that the dying brother for whom she has been grieving has made his peace with death: "Now wit and mischief were in his eyes again, and a new and brighter depth."

The collection's best story subtly recounts a self-consciously plain and timid woman's slow ascent toward fullness of feeling. The agent of her renewal is a quadriplegic named Drew who spends an evening drinking and telling stories in the bar where she, Emily, works. He is accompanied by a personal attendant, Alvin, who alertly and tenderly ministers to his needs. Emily finds herself drawn toward the pair. Drew's boisterous warmth contrasts starkly with her own abstemious wariness, and the rapport between him and Alvin be-speaks a level of trust and intimacy Emily has never known. When the bar closes, Emily joins Drew, Alvin, and some of her co-workers for some after-hours drinks. As she sits down next to Drew, he launches into an outrageous story about his recent efforts at sky-diving. The man who took him up in the plane explained to him that in his condition he had a 90 percent chance of injuring himself. Drew insisted nonetheless; the man strapped him to his chest, and they leapt. The few silent moments of free fall were sublime, Drew recounts, more than compensating for the two broken legs he suffered upon landing. He couldn't feel them anyway, he explains, and he laughed and shouted ecstatically the whole time, even as his partner could hear his bones breaking.

"Oh Drew," Emily says, impulsively reaching out and taking his hand. Her surface sentiment is pity, but the words also convey a deeper feeling of awe. As the evening winds down, it becomes clear that Drew's appetite for experience has shaken something free in Emily. She takes the first few steps toward breaking out of her own form of paralysis.

In a somewhat battered version of traditional comic structure, the evening concludes with a series of unions. Like new marriage partners at the end of a Shakespeare comedy, the characters pair off before leaving the narrative stage: As Alvin drives their van out of the parking lot, Drew says "Goodnight, sweet people." The remark is the final extension of the gentle, affectionate mood and the celebration of ordinary human courage and connection with which Dubus imbues the story.

Not all or even most of the stories in this collection end on so brave a note. In general, Dubus allows himself little sentimentality and no illusions. In a portrait of a solitary, fifty-five-year-old veteran of three divorces and five children, Dubus builds toward a bitterly sorrowful conclusion in which the man finds himself consumed with remorse at the end of a casual sexual encounter. In another story, a man is deeply wounded by a beloved younger woman's decision to abort their child rather than interrupt her promising acting career. But just as "Dancing after Hours" par-takes of the traditional structure of comedy these harsher stories usually have the effect of tragedy rather than of mere bad luck. They are framed by an over-arching moral vision which attempts to see human action as the combined product of individual choice and divine will.

Ritual, sin, sacrifice, guilt, and salvation through suffering are frequent themes in these stories, and remind us that Dubus is a committed Catholic who has often written on Catholic subjects in the past. Like Flannery O'Connor, he has a distinctively Catholic tendency to associate violence with tenderness, and anguish with insight. Like James Joyce, he has a distinctively Catholic tendency to sacralize the ordinary through artistic representation. And like religious writers in general, he attempts to see the apparently random and often harsh playing out of human fate not as a cosmic joke warranting cynicism, but as a transcendent mystery warranting reverence.