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The author of "House of Sand and Fog" is a discerning storyteller. Looking for pre-approved credit cards and blank checks, they steal trash from a banker in a misbegotten adventure that plunges those around Tom into trouble, adding to the mistakes for which he ought to atone. His underemployed neighbors play video games and smoke pot all day.Īlong with a friend, single mother Trina, Tom hatches a scheme. Today, Tom lives alone in a tiny apartment and drinks a lot of vodka. Meanwhile, the bank took Tom's house and his marriage collapsed. When his prescriptions expired, he "sent my young son Drew out into the cold to buy me a baggie of Os." Tom beat the habit, but 19-year-old Drew didn't forgive his dad. Surgery didn't alleviate his pain, and for a time, he was hooked on opioids.

But Dubus' evident desire to write a novel that helps heal a country wounded by opioid addiction, class warfare and other ills results in some schematic, clumsy scenes.Įverything changed for Tom when he fell from a roof and broke both hips. It's a big-hearted book and, like one of Tom's buildings, it has a dependable frame: likable characters, relatable dilemmas, strong prose. Like previous novels by the Massachusetts author, "Such Kindness" examines eternal themes through challenges facing blue-collar New Englanders. He's so desperate that he's about to commit an ill-considered crime. "All my life I've been a man who works," Tom Lowe says.But the last half-decade has been terrible for him, a calamitous stretch that emptied his wallet, ended his marriage and estranged him from his son. If you ask the hard-luck narrator of Andre Dubus III's new novel what he's accomplished in 54 years, he'll mention the carpentry business he owned and the houses he built, one of which he and his family called home in happier times.