Tuesday, August 14, 2012

THE GARDEN OF LAST DAYS by Andre Dubus III


The Garden of Last Days by Andre Dubus III (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008), 535 pages.
Also Available on Kindle.

(Novel)

Reviewed by Chuck Dayton



Sue and I had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Dubus at a book reading in Iowa City on June 9th, 2009, our wedding anniversary. He wrote a very complimentary note in my book regarding a question that I had asked. He is the son of Andre Dubus II, who is a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop. He was raised around authors in his early years, relating that he watched cartoons on Saturday mornings with his father’s best friend, Kurt Vonnegut, while growing up. This author’s first book, House of Sand and Fog was extremely popular and was eventually made into a movie.

The Garden of the Last Days is a novel set in south Florida, intertwining the lives of some very interesting people and some ordinary people. The title is played out in the garden of Jean, a widow, who tends her garden while babysitting a small child whose mother happens to be a stripper trying to make ends meet. In a rather long and involved plot, it is revealed to the reader that some patrons of a strip club turn out to be the Arab terrorists currently in flight schools in Florida, preparing for the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York.

It was interesting to me to see how the lives of ordinary people and the lives of these Arab men were so intertwined, and yet their goals were so different. Because of their incredibly conservative Muslim backgrounds, there is a lot of angst portrayed in their involvement with American culture. This is not a violent book, and the actual commission of the terrorist acts is but a small part of the plot. I recommend this book if you are interested in the interpersonal relationships of people of radically different cultures. 

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