The despair of these writers can never be as moving to a reader like me as it is to the writers themselves. At the heart of their work lies a keen regret that things are no longer as they once were between men and women, a regret so intense that it amounts to longing. It's this longing, endowed with the appearance of hard reality, that informs much of their writing. But from where I stand, the hard reality is this: that question about why things are not as they once were has got to be asked honestly, not rhetorically. Then something more might be known about why life is so empty now, and the work of writers as good as Andre Dubus, Raymond Carver, and Richard Ford would be wise as well as strong.