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.
