1999 National Book Award finalist, Fiction.
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!
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
"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