c. 1996 Religion News Service

(Andrew M. Greeley is a Roman Catholic priest, best-selling novelist and sociologist at the University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center. His home page on the World Wide Web is at http://www.greeley.com. Or contact him at his e-mail address: agreel(at sign)aol.com. Check RNS Online for a photo of Andrew Greeley.)

(RNS)-Andre Dubus, author of the new collection of short stories,”Dancing After Hours,”(Knopf) is the best Catholic storyteller since Graham Greene. In some ways, Dubus is even more Catholic than Greene because grace is more obvious in his stories and hope is far more powerful.

Two of the tales in this collection are stories about men who have been badly battered in painful accidents and who manage to cope gracefully with their agony.

The title story, set in a beachside bar on a hot summer day, tells how a paraplegic spreads grace to all around him. And in”The Colonel’s Wife,”an injured, retired officer and his wife each admit their marital infidelities. Both are tough and unsentimental accounts of how men and women cope with tragedy and give direction and purpose to their lives.”I’m glad that damned horse fell on me. It allows me to lie still in one place and look at you,”the soldier confesses at the end of”The Colonel’s Wife.” The interaction between husband and wife shines a light on the mystical dimension of everyday experience:”He knew this: sunlight on the twist of lemon in her glass as she lifted it by the stem and brought it to her red lips,”the soldier muses.”… She had made no promises and had not asked any of him. He did not want promises. There were words and feeling wafting about in a season he or Lydia might not live to see. He wanted only to know what had happened and what was happening now, to see that: brilliant as the sky, hot as the sun, bright as Lydia’s eyes.” Dubus, who himself was badly injured in an accident, writes from the inside of these problems where sentimentality is impossible. Several stories in this collection, together perhaps constituting a novella, are about a man crippled in Vietnam and the woman he eventually marries and the increasingly violent place America has become.

In”All the Time in the World,”a character named LuAnn, a devout Catholic according to her own lights, lives at”a time in America when courting had given way to passion, and passion burned without vision … passion became smoke and left burned grass and earth on the sheets.” After many love affairs, LuAnn meets Ted and knows he will be the man whose children she will bear:”This time love was taking her into pain, yes, quarrels and loneliness and boiling rage; but this time there was no time, and love was taking her as far as she would go as long as she would live, taking her strongly and bravely with this Ted Briggs, holding his pretty cane; this man who was frightened by what had happened to him, but not by he madness she knew he was feeling now. She was hungry, and she talked with her friends and waited for her steak and for all that was coming to her: from her body, from the earth, from radiant angels poised in the air she breathed.” The paragraph is a classic exercise in what the Rev. David Tracy calls the”Catholic imagination,”an imagination that sees grace everywhere, in the human body and in the earth, in the steak and the conversation with friends, in possibilities so dense and so hopeful that the very angels seem to be hovering over the young woman in love.

Many years later, in a story titled”Out of the Snow,”LuAnn, now the mother of three children, routs three rapists with a frying pan. Later, she tells her husband,”I didn’t hit those men men so I could be alive for the children or for you. I hit them so my blood could stay in my body; so I could keep breathing. And if it’s that easy, how are we supposed to live? If evil can walk through the door, and there’s a place deep in our hearts that knows how to look at its face, and beat it till it’s broken and bleeding, till it crawls away. And we do this rapture.” Ordinary people acting with extraordinary grace-that’s what Andre Dubus writes about. Such stories inspire more than a thousand sermons.

MJP END GREELEY