Why Do They Hate Us?
Andre Dubus imagines the stripper who danced for the terrorists before 9/11.

Reviewed by Anthony Giardina
Sunday, June 22, 2008

THE GARDEN OF LAST DAYS

By Andre Dubus III

Norton. 535 pp. $24.95

So here's the setup: A decent if rootless American working girl commits a minor household slip-up, which sets her on a collision course with a wounded yet determined émigré from a Middle Eastern hotbed. Caught somewhere in the wreckage created by these two is a basically decent but likewise wounded blue-collar worker.

Does that description, which roughly applies to Andre Dubus's new novel, The Garden of Last Days, sound familiar? It should. In his previous novel, the wildly popular House of Sand and Fog, a girl named Kathy managed to lose the rights to a house in California by not attending carefully enough to her mail; her émigré-nemesis was a deposed Iranian general from the days of the Shah, and the working stiff was the cop who fell in love with Kathy. If the tragedy was laid on a little thick (never before had so much trouble followed from an unopened tax bill), Dubus was on to something in contrasting late 20th-century American laxness with the new immigrant energy.

In The Garden of Last Days, Dubus's peripatetic working girl is named April. A single mother, she has recently moved from New Hampshire to the Gulf Coast of Florida, where she's found a degree of financial empowerment by working as a stripper. Her household slip-up is her failure to have a backup babysitter. When the landlady who regularly watches Franny, April's 3-year-old, checks into a hospital, there's nothing for April to do but bring her daughter to her workplace, which happens to be the Puma Club for Men.

On the night in question -- Sept. 6, 2001 -- a young man named Bassam decides to visit the Puma. Bassam, along with a few fellow Saudis, has been taking flying lessons in Florida in preparation for an assault-by-airplane on some major American targets in five days. Before he dies, he wants to explore the nakedness of an American woman.

We're well prepared, then, for the now familiar Dubusian clash of cultures. To fill out the pattern, there's a construction worker named AJ hanging around outside the Puma, having been tossed out for getting too forward with one of the women. But rather than take us into the potentially rich struggle between April and Bassam (he asks her to strip for him, privately, in the Puma's "Champagne Room"), Dubus takes a very odd turn. He virtually hands the novel over to AJ, who, finding April's daughter lost in the Puma's parking lot, proceeds to abduct her. Though we never fully lose sight of April or Bassam (this being a book of parallel narratives), the abduction forms the center of the story. Neither entirely believable nor particularly tense (AJ is too good-hearted to represent a threat to Franny), the long ride these two set out on does allow Dubus a wider focus than the one he employed in House of Sand and Fog. With AJ at the wheel and a lost little girl behind him, this becomes a novel of side trips: to the rape of AJ's mother at one point, into the romantic and educational failures of a bouncer at the Puma Club at another. The larger intent seems to be to give us a Cinemascope view of our vast American lostness in those prelapsarian "last days" before 9/11.

For this to work, the side trips have to be worth our time, but for the most part, they're not, being instead serious drags on the novel's forward motion. It would help, too, if AJ himself weren't such a dunderhead. Though his initial impulse in abducting Franny is "to give the girl some comfort," he forgoes all readerly respect when he starts thinking of Franny as a second child to bring home to his son and his wife, who has thrown him out. ("He pictured being able to keep her. A playmate for Cole. A living doll for Deena to love and raise.")

It comes as a relief when Dubus finally gives up on AJ and returns the novel to Bassam and the plans for 9/11. On the Sunday before the hijackings, Bassam and a fellow conspirator, resting up in a Boston hotel, have sex with a call girl. In its mixing of erotic wonder and religious disgust, this is the novel's best scene. But it's also a reminder of how relentlessly American writers have concentrated on sex as a way to come to grips with the hijackers.

As was the case with John Updike's Terrorist, the religious attitudes of Dubus's Muslims here feel carefully documented, and hollow. "We are just moments away, brothers, Allah willing" is a line I never expected to read in a serious contemporary novel. Nor am I particularly fond of "Brothers, we have bound ourselves to the Holy One as shuhada." Lines like these more properly belong in the mouth of the turbaned villain played by Anthony Quinn in "The Road to Morocco."

It's left to April, questioned by the FBI, to deliver the novel's valediction on Bassam. He was "like a boy. Just some drunk and lonely boy." Seven years after the events, that attitude begins to seem inadequate. The sex and the loneliness of the hijackers have been well documented by novelists. A truly imaginative rendering of "Allah," on the other hand, is still waiting in the wings. ·

Anthony Giardina's most recent publications are "White Guys," a novel, and "Custody of the Eyes," a play.