House of Sand and Fog - ISBNLookup.com

Boston Globe

“A page-turner with a beating heart.”

Baltimore Sun

“A mixture of classical tragedy perfectly imbued with film noir. . . . [T]he work of a writer who is the real thing.”

Los Angeles Times

“[A] fine and prophetic novel.”

Washington Post Book World

“Elegant and powerful. . . . An unusual and volatile literary thriller.”

San Francisco Chronicle

A craftsman of character and dialogue, Dubus has dared to push his limits.

Mirabella

Unputdownable...a page-turner that's a mind-opener...a thriller with moral complexity.

Publishers Weekly

Dubus's chronicle of the American Dream gone awry is distinguished by his sympathetic delineation of lower-middle class life.

Richard Eder

A fine and prophetic novel.
—Los Angeles Times

Bill Sharp

[E]xamines what happens when ordinary men and women move across the tenuous barrier between the normal and the irrational....a story...about how people...are repeatedly trapped by circumstances and transformed...
—New York Times Book Review

Publishers Weekly

Dubus has created a novel that is nearly perfectly suited to the audio format. Kathy Nicolo is a recovering addict whose husband has left her and who is making her way in the straight world with her own cleaning business. When her house in the California hills is mistakenly seized by the county for back taxes and sold at public auction, she finds herself living out of her car and on the brink of desperation. Once a wealthy and powerful man in Iran and a colonel in the army under the Shah's rule, Behrani is now a struggling immigrant who hopes that he can sell the house for a large profit, so that he can once again provide his family with a lifestyle like the one they enjoyed in Iran. Emotions take precedence over ethics, logic, love and the law as their paths collide in a surprising and tragic conclusion. The reading by the author and his wife is sublime. Dubus's performance as the hot-headed Behrani is frightening in its intensity. His wife captures Kathy's dispassionate disbelief with a flat distance that is as effectively realistic as it is palpable. Based on the Norton hardcover. (Jan.) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Through a careless bureaucratic error, Kathy Nicolo is evicted from her three-bedroom home in the California hills near San Francisco. Her marriage is over, her recovery from drug addiction is tenuous, and her income is almost nonexistent. Lester Burdon, the deputy sheriff who evicts her, also falls for her and vows to help her get the house back. Meanwhile, the house is sold at auction to Colonel Behrani, who hopes to resell it at enormous profit to help finance his return to his easy life in prerevolutionary Iran. The legal machinery grinds on slowly too slowly for the humans involved. The three main characters come from different cultures, religions, and social settings. The pleas, threats, arguments, and suggestions of each individual are incomprehensible to the others, escalating to a tragic and inevitable conclusion. Well produced, this book captures the hope, confusion, resolve, and uncertainty of all the characters. The frustration and anger are visceral, the tension intense. The actions of the players are made meaningful through the descriptions of their histories, cultures, and previous experiences. Read with feeling by the author and his wife, Fontaine Dubus; recommended. Joanna Burkhardt, Univ. of Rhode Island Coll. of Continuing Education Lib., Providence Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

From The Critics

Just Too Bleak for Me

Andre Dubus III's novel (and Oprah's pick) House Of Sand And Fog creates a conflict between two families over the ownership of a house in the San Francisco area. Kathy Nicolo loses her home due to failure to pay back taxes and a complete disregard for the legal system. The Behrani family, Iranian immigrants used to a better way of life, purchase the house at auction and the remainder of the novel centers around the struggle and ultimate confrontation over who owns the house.

I've read a lot of reviews of this book and I saw Oprah's group discuss it at length on TV. While I liked the author's style and believe him to have a great voice for storytelling, I just don't think this modern American tragedy is for me. I liked the Behranis very much and felt little sympathy for Kathy Nicolo, so the ending really shocked me, as it did other reviewers and Oprah's guests.

I will read Dubus again, but I can't recommend this book because it is so very bleak and without even a glimmer of hope. I see enough sad stories in the paper and on the nightly news — I don't need to find them in my fiction, too!

The Philadelphia Inquirer

This is exceptional storytelling, true to life....A remarkable book. Andre Dubus III has crafted a searing and insightful chronicle of aspiration and desperation.

Mark Grief

Two hundred pages into House of Sand and Fog, the dual stories that have run parallel from the beginning of the book suddenly join. The shock of the meeting is like two trains converging unexpectedly at the same junction -- a dim threat has become real, and lives are shattered. Andre Dubus III displays a sensitivity to human needs shot through with violence in this tale of immigrants and ex-addicts, of love and pride at the margins of American society. House of Sand and Fog is a serious novel of character that is impossible to put down. The vagaries of the American dream have brought only bad news to Colonel Massoud Amir Behrani. Before the Shah fell from power, the Colonel held a high position in the Iranian air force. Now he spears trash along with a work crew on the California roadside. An advertisement for a house at auction, repossessed by the state, presents one last chance for the Colonel to reverse the family fortunes. Withdrawing his entire savings, he buys the underpriced bungalow in San Mateo and renovates it. The simple house works magic: His wife and son respect Behrani again, and his long-buried hope for happiness returns.

But all is not well outside this immigrant tale -- America has in the meantime failed its settled inhabitants. Kathy Lazaro is hanging on to her sobriety after a recovery from addictions to cocaine and alcohol. She has recently moved west with her husband to build a new life, only to have her husband walk out. All she had left was her little bungalow in San Mateo. Now, through a bureaucratic error, the house has been repossessed for unpaid taxes. Not even the arrival of a handsome deputy sheriff named Lester Burdon -- who takes an interest in Kathy after serving the order of eviction -- can diminish Kathy's pain and obsession. The house and her old life can't be separated, and she wants both of them back.

The bungalow the Colonel buys and the house Kathy loses are, of course, the same. Dubus alternates between the two characters' voices. He enters their heads to catch the minute sensations of their present existence and to slowly unravel their histories. Colonel Behrani is the more colorful of the two, uttering phrases in Farsi and re-creating in daydreams the opulence of his remembered Teheran -- yet his present frustration is palpable. Kathy is more simple in her wants and her memories, and her story is sadder. As the book teaches us to care for each of them, to sympathize with each one's desire for the house and a decent life, the plot brutally pits them one against the other. For the house, they will do anything.

The rising tide of destruction in the novel speaks to the violence held in each character's past. In Iran, the Colonel turned a blind eye to the murder and torture that upheld the Shah's regime, thinking it was separate from his own tactics of order. As an addict, Kathy numbed her self-hatred with drugs. Lester Burdon, the policeman, has tried to do right by victims like Kathy -- and has wound up embracing the brutality and bullying he so despised. After Kathy and Lester Burdon become lovers, they resolve to get the house back by some simple intimidation. But threats, once unleashed, are never simple, and the three characters draw each other toward a collective doom.

Dubus' narration occurs mostly in the blinkered first person and present tense of so much contemporary writing. This is the kind of realism that has us eat, sit, smoke, and lie in bed with the characters, attentive to their passing sensations, heedless of the demands of drama or event. Yet Dubus has managed to harness this style and put it to work within a richer field of literary endeavor. The book's gravity and the artfulness of its multiple perspectives recall Faulkner. The slow demolition of each protagonist on account of a fatal flaw yields the rich savor of tragedy.

The only point on which the book stumbles is in its effort to forge a more far-reaching American tragedy. The painful dance of defense executed by the three principals seems at times to be meant to expose the larger rottenness of society: "America, the Land of Milk and Honey," a peripheral character declares. "They never tell you the milk's gone sour and the honey's stolen." Apart from the bureaucratic mistake that gives the house to the Colonel in the first place, though, official America seems to have nothing to do with Kathy or the Colonel's troubles. Hospitals, prisons, police stations, and legal offices all appear, but they seem like stage sets at the edge of a more vivid, more real world.

The novel's strengths lie in repetition, intimacy, strategy, and mounting rage. We come to know the characters completely before the tinder catches and the banal situation turns violent. Andre Dubus III has achieved a literary triumph, capturing the simple choices made by ordinary people that doom them to sensational destruction.

Mark Grief is a writer living in Oxford, England.
— barnesandnoble.com

San Diego Union Tribune

A smart, raw study in the clash of cultures....An utterly believable, riveting journey....[Dubus] has hit a nerve.

Bill Sharp

Mirabella

Unputdownable...a page-turner that's a mind-opener...a thriller with moral complexity.

San Francisco Chronicle

A craftsman of character and dialogue, Dubus has dared to push his limits.

Richard Eder

A fine and prophetic novel.
—Los Angeles Times

Kirkus Reviews

In an enthralling tragedy built on a foundation of small misfortunes, Dubus (Bluesman) offers in detail the unraveling life of a woman who, in her undoing, brings devastation to the families of those in her path. It was bad enough when Kathy Lazaro stepped out of the shower one morning to find herself evicted from her house, a small bungalow to be auctioned the very next day in a county tax sale; bad enough that her recovering-addict husband had left her some time before, and that she had no friends at all in California to help her move or put her up. Then she also had to fall for the guy who evicted her, Deputy Les Burdon—married, with two kids. Sympathetic to her plight, Les lines up legal counsel and makes sure she has a place to stay, but his optimism (and the lawyer's) hits an immovable object in proud ex-Colonel Behrani, formerly of the Iranian Air Force, who fled his homeland with his family when the Shah was deposed and who has struggled secretly in San Francisco for years to maintain appearances until his daughter can make a good marriage. He's sunken his remaining life savings into buying Kathy's house, at a tremendous bargain, planning to reinvent himself as a real-estate speculator, and he has no wish to sell it back when informed that the county made a bureaucratic error. Hounded by both Kathy and Les—who has moved out, guiltily, on his family and brought his lover, herself a recovering addict, back to the bar scene-Behrani is increasingly unable to shield his wife and teenaged son from the ugly truth, but he still won't yield. Then Kathy tries to kill herself, and Les takes the law into his own hands.

From the Publisher

"A page-turner with a beating heart." —The Boston Globe

"A mixture of classical tragedy perfectly imbued with film noir.... House of Sand and Fog is the work of a writer who is the real thing." —The Baltimore Sun

"Elegant and powerful.... An unusual and volatile literary thriller." —The Washington Post Book World

"House of Sand and Fog is one of the best American novels I've ever read." —James Lee Burke