Much of the media attention surrounding The Garden of Last Days, the new novel from Andre Dubus III, has focused on the fact that Dubus went to strip clubs in Florida for research, because the novel is set in one such club where, on the weekend before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, a future terrorist buys a private session with a stripper (among several other narrative arcs converging on the club). When I met Dubus for lunch last week, though, I was more interested in the time he spent trying to get inside that terrorist’s head. He told me that the character of Bassam, who had only been seen through the eyes of other characters, started pushing at him at a time when the manuscript “really felt like it was dying,” and refused to be ignored.
“I spent four months reading about Islam,” he said. “I read the Koran cover to cover, I read a history of Saudi Arabia, I read books about 9/11, including the commission report. I was grateful that the novel steered me to this area of ignorance and forced me to rectify it.” But, for all that, he said, “I didn’t know if the novel was still going to be there for me” when he returned from his study period and tried to start writing about Bassam. “Whether the book ultimately worked or not, though, it was the right thing to have put him in.”
Bassam wasn’t the only character to force his way into the story’s foreground. Another character, AJ, is tossed out of the strip club early on for touching another dancer, but Dubus keeps revisiting his anger and frustration, until he winds up playing a crucial (and unexpected) role at the climactic mid-point. “I never saw AJ coming,” Dubus said of the plot twist. “I sure as hell didn’t plan it… Honestly, I don’t try to write ‘suspensefully.’ I try to keep the story clear, and to write dramatic tension into each scene, but I’m not trying to write a pageturner.”
Juggling the novel’s multiple points of view was a difficult process; Dubus said his first “final” draft was 250 pages longer, and included scenes with five other peripheral characters. “The revision was exhausting,” he allowed. “I did a lot of cutting and pasting, rearranging scenes.” I wondered if he’d felt any pressure on this book, his first full-length novel since Oprah Winfrey made The House of Sand and Fog an instant bestseller. “There was probably pressure, but I’m oblivious to it,” he said. “I’m so grateful for the success [of House and Sand and Fog]. It changed our lives in a very powerful way. To want that success again felt greedy to me, though.”
“I pay attention to the writing, not the publishing world,” he continued. “I think about that only to the extent that it’s the primary way I make a living for my family.” I’d been thinking more about the internal pressure, but he said that wasn’t a problem either, that he doesn’t think about “writing a book” while he’s writing, but gives himself over to the story: “If there’s one enemy to creativity, it’s self-consciousness.”
For his next project, Dubus is weighing his options between a set of novellas or a “memoir-length collection” of personal essays, after abandoning a novel he says he’s been trying to write for the last 25 years, including several years right after House of Sand and Fog, based on his experiences growing up in the 1970s. “I don’t think I’m the knid of writer who can write fiction from my own life,” he admitted.