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Dubus's characters -- blue-collar people who live in the old mill towns not far from Boston -- are mechanics, waitresses, bartenders, and construction workers. They have almost no conversation in them, and very little sense of things beyond their own immediate needs. They drink, they smoke, they ma…

It is inconceivable in The Sportswriter that a person who is a woman should strike Frank simply as a familiar, as another human being floating around in the world, lost, empty, shocked to the bone by the way it's all turned out. He feels compassion for women but not empathy. At bottom, they do not …

There's a novel by Richard Ford in which the narrating protagonist says, "Women have always lightened my burdens, picked up my faltering spirits and exhilarated me with the old anything-goes feeling though anything doesn't go, of course, and never did. . . . [But now] . . . I have slipped for a mom…

Connection between people like Toni and Leo is predicated on the existence of a world in which men and women conform to a romantic notion of themselves as men and women. These two have never been real to each other. They were bound to end in her stretch marks, his convertible. Carver knows that. In…

Presently he reaches out his hand and touches her hip. . . . He runs his fingers over her hip and feels the stretch marks there. They are like roads, and he traces them in her flesh. He runs his fingers back and forth, first one, then another. They run everywhere in her flesh, dozens, perhaps hun…