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 make love: without a stop. Inevitably, the limitation of appetite becomes apparent, and they begin to suffer. When they suffer, they do terrible things to themselves, and to one another. There is nothing any of them can do to mitigate the suffering. They cannot educate themselves out of their lives; they can't leave home, and they can't get reborn. This situation is Dubus's subject, the thing he concentrates on with all his writer's might. His concentration is penetrating. We feel his people trapped in their lives so acutely that they enter into us.