(He) handed me a copy of Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha. “In the shade of the house, in the sunshine of the riverbank near the boats, in the shade of the Sal-wood forest, in the shade of the fig tree is where Siddhartha grew up.” Reading that sentence for the first time in the small bedroom I shared with Charlie, it was as if I were reading about myself: In the shade of the house, in the sunshine of the highway near the droning automobiles, in the shade of the pine trees, in the shade of the dead-end street is where Tom Lowe Jr. grew up. Siddhartha and his search for who he was meant to be, it was me on that river, it was me on those banks, and it was me who began to see books as doorways to worlds that could only help me rise in this one. And I did rise. I sure as hell did.
— Andre Dubus III, Such Kindness: A Novel (W.W. Norton, June 6, 2023)
Notes:
Los Angeles Times Book Review by Lorraine Berry, June 8, 2023: ‘Sand and Fog’ author Andre Dubus III crafts a white-working-class Buddha story.
In a culture in which men are taught from an early age to overpower any obstacle, to ignore their feelings, to control a problem rather than surrender to it, to talk but not to listen, it would be easy to mock a novel about a man who chooses empathy. Dubus probes at masculinity’s wounds, its core beliefs about earning money as a means of caring for others, and exposes the selfishness and emptiness at its core.
Tom becomes, then, an alternative model of masculinity. To figure out his place in this community, he will have to make himself vulnerable and soft rather than brittle and mean. Dubus, meanwhile, models this vulnerability by risking earnestness inside of a literary culture that rewards the armor of irony. He reminds me of Rilke, who wrote to a young poet about how he needed to be patient, to learn the lessons of pain. To recognize that the paralysis of suffering deafens us to our own emotions. “Such Kindness” is an astonishing novel about all these feelings, and the actions they call forth when we pay attention.