House of Sand and Fog (Dubus)

House of Sand and Fog
Andre Dubus III, 1999
Knopf Doubleday
365 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780393338119


Summary
In this riveting novel of almost unbearable suspense, three fragile yet determined people become dangerously entangled in a relentlessly escalating crisis.

Colonel Behrani, once a wealthy man in Iran, is now a struggling immigrant willing to bet everything he has to restore his family's dignity. Kathy Nicolo is a troubled young woman whose house is all she has left, and who refuses to let her hard-won stability slip away from her. Sheriff Lester Burdon, a married man who finds himself falling in love with Kathy, becomes obsessed with helping her fight for justice.

Drawn by their competing desires to the same small house in the California hills and doomed by their tragic inability to understand one another, the three converge in an explosive collision course. Combining unadorned realism with profound empathy, House of Sand and Fog marks the arrival of a major new voice in American fiction. (From the publisher.)

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Author Bio
• Birth—1959
• Where—Oceanside, California, USA
• Education—B.S., Univ. of Texas; Univ. of Wisconsin
• Awards—Pushcart Prize; National Magazine Award-Fiction,
  1985
• Currently—lives in Newberry, Massachusetts

Andre Dubus III is an American writer best known as the author of the novel House of Sand and Fog, which was a National Book Award finalist in 1999 and was made into a movie in 2003. His other books include Bluesman, a 1993 novel, and The Cage Keeper and Other Stories from 1989. Dubus's work has been awarded a Pushcart Prize and the 1985 National Magazine Award for Fiction. It has also been included in "The One Hundred Most Distinguished Stories of 1993" and The Best American Short Stories of 1994. He was one of three finalists for the 1994 Prix de Rome given by the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

He started his college career at Bradford College (Massachusetts), where his father taught, before moving on to study sociology at the University of Texas. He eventually dropped out of a Ph.D. program in the theory of social change at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and then roamed the country working at a variety of jobs, including carpenter, construction worker, bounty hunter, bartender, counselor at a treatment center, and actor, before settling upon being a fiction writer.

He lives in Newbury, Massachusetts, with his wife, dancer and choreographer Fontaine Dollas, and their three children. He currently is on the adjunct faculty at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, where he teaches general writing, fiction, and directed study courses.

His father, Andre Dubus (1936-1999), was a well known writer of short stories and novellas, and his cousin is the mystery writer James Lee Burke. (From Wikipedia.)

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Book Reviews 
[E]xamines what happens when ordinary men and women move across the tenuous barrier between the normal and the irrational....a story...about how people...are repeatedly trapped by circumstances and transformed...
Bill Sharp - The New York Times Book Review

(Audio version.) Dubus has created a novel that is nearly perfectly suited to the audio format. Kathy Nicolo is a recovering addict whose husband has left her and who is making her way in the straight world with her own cleaning business. When her house in the California hills is mistakenly seized by the county for back taxes and sold at public auction, she finds herself living out of her car and on the brink of desperation. Once a wealthy and powerful man in Iran and a colonel in the army under the Shah's rule, Behrani is now a struggling immigrant who hopes that he can sell the house for a large profit, so that he can once again provide his family with a lifestyle like the one they enjoyed in Iran. Emotions take precedence over ethics, logic, love and the law as their paths collide in a surprising and tragic conclusion. The reading by the author and his wife is sublime. Dubus's performance as the hot-headed Behrani is frightening in its intensity. His wife captures Kathy's dispassionate disbelief with a flat distance that is as effectively realistic as it is palpable. 
Publishers Weekly

Through a careless bureaucratic error, Kathy Nicolo is evicted from her three-bedroom home in the California hills near San Francisco. Her marriage is over, her recovery from drug addiction is tenuous, and her income is almost nonexistent. Lester Burdon, the deputy sheriff who evicts her, also falls for her and vows to help her get the house back. Meanwhile, the house is sold at auction to Colonel Behrani, who hopes to resell it at enormous profit to help finance his return to his easy life in prerevolutionary Iran. The legal machinery grinds on slowly too slowly for the humans involved. The three main characters come from different cultures, religions, and social settings. The pleas, threats, arguments, and suggestions of each individual are incomprehensible to the others, escalating to a tragic and inevitable conclusion. Well produced, this book captures the hope, confusion, resolve, and uncertainty of all the characters. The frustration and anger are visceral, the tension intense. The actions of the players are made meaningful through the descriptions of their histories, cultures, and previous experiences. Read with feeling by the author and his wife, Fontaine Dubus; recommended. —Joanna Burkhardt, Univ. of Rhode Island Coll. of Continuing Education Lib., Providence
Library Journal

In an enthralling tragedy built on a foundation of small misfortunes, Dubus (Bluesman) offers in detail the unraveling life of a woman who, in her undoing, brings devastation to the families of those in her path. It was bad enough when Kathy Lazaro stepped out of the shower one morning to find herself evicted from her house, a small bungalow to be auctioned the very next day in a county tax sale; bad enough that her recovering-addict husband had left her some time before, and that she had no friends at all in California to help her move or put her up. Then she also had to fall for the guy who evicted her, Deputy Les Burdon—married, with two kids. Sympathetic to her plight, Les lines up legal counsel and makes sure she has a place to stay, but his optimism (and the lawyer's) hits an immovable object in proud ex-Colonel Behrani, formerly of the Iranian Air Force, who fled his homeland with his family when the Shah was deposed and who has struggled secretly in San Francisco for years to maintain appearances until his daughter can make a good marriage. He's sunken his remaining life savings into buying Kathy's house, at a tremendous bargain, planning to reinvent himself as a real-estate speculator, and he has no wish to sell it back when informed that the county made a bureaucratic error. Hounded by both Kathy and Les—who has moved out, guiltily, on his family and brought his lover, herself a recovering addict, back to the bar scene—Behrani is increasingly unable to shield his wife and teenaged son from the ugly truth, but he still won't yield. Then Kathy tries to kill herself, and Les takes the law into his own hands.
Kirkus Reviews

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Discussion Questions 
1. Do you sympathize more with Kathy Nicolo or with Colonel Behrani in part one of the novel? How does Dubus's use of alternating first-person narratives affect your response to, and involvement with, the characters?

2. The contested ownership of the house on Bisgrove Street is the fulcrum of the novel's plot. Who, in your opinion, owns the house once Behrani has paid cash for it? What would be a fair solution to the conflict?

3. Early in the novel Behrani buys himself a hat, which he says gives him "the appearance of a man with a sense of humor about living, a man who is capable to live life for the living of it" [p. 28]. Why is this a poignant thing for Behrani to wish for himself? Does he in fact take life too seriously?

4. What does Kathy's response to Nick's desertion reveal about her character? Why does Lester fall in love with Kathy? Is he better for her than Nick was?

5. Lester tells Kathy that he had wanted to become a teacher, but plans changed when Carol became pregnant. Is Lester's job in law enforcement a poor fit for him? Why did he once plant evidence in a domestic violence case?

6. Who, of the three main characters, is most complex? Who is most straightforward?

7. Where does the hostility between Lester and Behrani spring from? How do their memories–Lester's of his teenage girlfriend and her brother, Behrani's of his murdered cousin, Jasmeen–function to reveal the deep emotions that motivate action in thisnovel?

8. At what point do Kathy's and Lester's actions depart from the path of a simple desire for justice and move into something else? Why can neither of them seem to act rationally? Does Behrani act rationally?

9. Does Lester drink to break free of a sense of deadness, or to anesthetize himself? Why does he risk his family life as well as his professional life for his involvement with Kathy? Is he attempting to reinvigorate his life, or is he unconsciously seeking to destroy himself?

10. Note the epigraph to the novel, from "The Balcony" by Octavio Paz: "Beyond myself/ somewhere/ I wait for my arrival." How does it apply to the problems of self and alienation in each of the three main characters? Who has the clearest sense of his or her identity? What does it mean to have a clear sense of self?

11. Describing the success of her recovery program, Kathy says, "I had already stopped wanting what I'd been craving off and on since I was fifteen, for Death to come take me the way the wind does a dried leaf out on its limb" [p. 46]. How does the novel affect your response to the social and psychological issues of addiction, depression, and suicide? Do you find yourself being understanding or judgmental of Kathy as the stress of the conflict increases? Is she actually more of a survivor than she thinks she is?

12. Is Behrani's wife, Nadereh, an admirable character? Does her feminine role in a very traditional marriage reduce her importance as an actor in this drama? Does she have qualities that are missing in Behrani, Kathy, and Lester?

13. Behrani tells his son, "Remember what I've told you of so many Americans: they are not disciplined and have not the courage to take responsibility for their actions. If these people paid to us the fair price we are asking, we could leave and she could return. It is that simple. But they are like little children, son. They want things only their way" [p. 172]. How accurate is his perception of Americans? How well does it apply to Kathy and Lester?

14. How does House of Sand and Fog highlight the conflict between downwardly mobile Americans and upwardly mobile recent immigrants? What role does racism play in the reaction of Americans and foreigners to each other?

15. Why has Kathy avoided telling her mother and brother the truth about her situation? Does their meeting at the end of the novel resolve any of Kathy's difficult feelings about her place in the family?

16. Should Behrani be held responsible, on some level, for the crimes and excesses of the Shah's regime? Is he responsible for Esmail's fate?

17. Why does Behrani put on his military uniform at the climax of the novel?

18. What do you find most disturbing about the novel's denouement? If you find yourself imagining an alternate ending, what would that ending be?
(Questions issued by publisher.)

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