Though his name might not lead you to think it, Andre Dubus III is the younger half of America's answer to Kingsley and Martin Amis. Dubus's father, Andre Dubus II, was a well‑known short-story writer whose work was feted for its psychological realism. Andre III – born in 1959 – is the author of three novels, including the 1999 bestseller House of Sand and Fog. From these facts, it would be natural to assume that Townie: A Memoir would have a strong literary flavour: that authors and books would feature on almost every page; that the writing life would be extensively chronicled. But the surprise of Townie is that, while literature isn't absent, the book's real focus lies elsewhere, in the quite separate (though not, Dubus suggests, wholly disconnected) realm of male violence.
Dubus's family (he is the second of four children) moved from Iowa to Massachusetts when he was eight, when his father, an ex-Marine, got a job teaching writing at a small college. At first, things were relatively happy. His parents, impoverished bohemians, held regular parties and Dubus remembers the house being "filled with talk and laughter, jazz playing on the record player". But his lascivious dad couldn't keep his hands off his students and it wasn't long before he left his wife to move in with one of them. Promptly, the parties stopped and from this point on things went rapidly downhill.
Dubus's mother, left with four children, moved the family into a succession of "cheap rented houses" in various mill towns along the Merrimack river: Lowell, Newburyport, Haverhill. (His dad continued to live nearby.) These had once been prosperous places, but now, with most industry gone, they had a ruined, abandoned feel. Dubus's mother took various low-paying jobs and the children were increasingly left to their own devices. A spirit of anarchy ruled the house: dirty dishes stacked up; Andre and his siblings started taking drugs and failing to get to school on time. Above all, they were powerless to prevent the roughness of the neighbourhoods they inhabited cascading into their lives. Whenever they moved to a new house, some version of the following scene would take place:
"Kids roamed the neighbourhood like dogs. The first week I was sitting in the sun on our steps, I made the mistake of watching them go by as they walked up the middle of the street, three or four boys with no shirts... the tallest one, his short hair so blond it looked white, said, 'What're you lookin' at, fuck face?'
'Nothing.'
There he was on the bottom step. He pushed me hard in the chest and kicked my shin.
'You want your face rearranged, faggot?'"
Soon Dubus was having his face rearranged regularly. Aged 14, he watched his younger brother, Jed, who had already tried to kill himself, being viciously assaulted because he'd got off with the sister of a local thug. The incident marked a kind of watershed. If no one else was going to protect him and his siblings – and his parents had manifestly failed in this regard – Dubus would have to do it himself. And so he set about turning himself into someone capable of standing up to the bullies – a small-town Clint Eastwood. In the basement was a set of weights and he began working out for two or more hours each night, gradually building up bulk. He stopped drinking, watched his diet and began hanging out with other athletic types. Soon he acquired the bodybuilder's familiar ripped look. His elder sister told him that girls at school were starting to notice him. This, he writes, "was an encouraging and flattering thought but oddly beside the point".
Looking intimidating is one thing, however; being prepared to use your muscles is another. In a bar one night, Dubus got the chance to put his new strength to the test when a gang began picking on his brother. With a single blow, Dubus floored someone who had previously terrified him, knocking out two of his teeth. "'You fuckin' nailed him,' a friend said admiringly. "I nodded and smiled, then I was laughing and I couldn't remember feeling this good about anything in my life ever before." Later that night, Andre replayed the incident in his head: "I wished I'd hurt Jim Lynch even more than I had."
From this point, violence becomes Dubus's creed, his default response to any threat. He writes brilliantly of the mental shifts that enable this to happen, using the metaphor of a membrane that has to be punctured by an act of will. "This was different from sex, where if you both want it, the membranes fall away, but with violence you had to break that membrane yourself, and once you learned how to do that, it was easier to keep doing it."
As this image suggests, the trouble with violence is that it is uncontainable. Soon Dubus is getting into fights (which he mostly wins) all the time. He can't go into a bar without smashing someone's head in. And while the impulses behind such acts are benign – he wants to take on the bullies, to protect the weak – he can't help but become aware of the contradictions of his position. One night, he beats someone up simply because they looked at a friend's girlfriend. Later, he lies in bed thinking about it. "What was so wrong about just looking at Theresa's ass? As long as he was quiet about it, and she didn't see him do it and so didn't feel objectified and violated, what was so wrong with that? Didn't I look at women like that all the damn time? So who was I to do what I did?"
These are the sorts of questions that Dubus increasingly grapples with in the second half of Townie: who is he really and what kind of man will he become? Will violence remain his creed or will he find a better way to live? He goes to college, where Marxist history offers a new perspective on the problems of oppression and exploitation. After years of near-estrangement, he resumes a relationship with his dad and learns, through his example, that writing, too, can be an effective form of anger-release.
Yet one of the strengths of the book is that no path is ever straightforward. Violence in one form or another keeps re-entering Dubus's life and matters are complicated by the fact that his father, no doubt influenced by his son, develops a taste for it too, acquiring several guns and at one point suggesting that they hire someone in San Francisco to "break the legs" of the abusive husband of Dubus's elder sister. By the time the memoir ends, though, all this is long in Dubus's past, a distance that, he observes, is necessary for him to be able to write about it convincingly.
Townie is by no means perfect: parts are overwritten, others go on too long and there's a larger problem to do with how Dubus presents himself. Although he makes it clear that the way he behaved was often wrong, he also can't help but emerge from his account as something of a hero – he was, after all, the one who didn't run meekly away, who stood up to his oppressors. In a memoir, heroism is an uncomfortable space for the author to occupy.
Yet despite its rough edges, Townie is a mesmerising work, one of the best accounts I've encountered of violence and its causes. It is worth reading just for Dubus's lengthy descriptions of fighting – passages that exhilarate even as they sicken.
