Spinning the Harshness of Life Into Gold : BROKEN VESSELS, <i> by Andre Dubus,</i> David Godine, $19.95, 194 pages

Andre Dubus is, quite literally, a writer’s writer.

After a 1986 automobile accident shattered his body--and, in a real sense, his life--an honor guard of fellow authors appeared at public readings to raise money for Dubus and his family.

Ann Beattie, E. L. Doctorow, Gail Godwin, John Irving, Stephen King, John Updike and Kurt Vonnegut were among the celebrated writers who showed themselves to be appreciative readers of Dubus.

“He is,” Tobias Wolff writes in an introduction to Dubus’s latest book, “a master.”

A collection of short autobiographical essays, “Broken Vessels” helps us see exactly why Dubus inspires such loyalty and esteem in his colleagues. Although his nine earlier books are fiction, Dubus here offers an unembellished account of his life as a Marine Corps officer, burnt-out teacher, failed sheepherder, hardscrabble free-lance writer, self-summoned champion of urban maidens, husband and father several times over, and finally, now, “a particular kind of cripple,” as Dubus insists on calling himself.

“I have lost three wives,” Dubus writes, “and daily and nightly living with six children, and my left leg below the knee and most of the functions of my right one.”

Dubus claims that his ordeal has enabled him to perceive the inner ugliness of humanity with special acuity: “Living as a cripple,” he writes, “allows you to see more clearly the crippled hearts of some people whose bodies are whole and sound.”

Dubus proclaims himself to be a believer in “the mysteries of love and mortality,” a man who perceives in the sacrament of the Eucharist the sensation of “the tongue on flesh.” He is capable of genuine ecstasy:

“We can bring our human, distracted love into focus with an act that doesn’t need words, an act which dramatizes for us what we are together,” he writes. “The act itself can be anything: five beaten and scrambled eggs, two glasses of wine, running beside each other in rhythm with the pace and breath of the beloved.”

Mostly, though, “Broken Vessels” is a catalogue of losses, as the title implies; it’s a war story in which the field of battle is “the gate, the walls, the prison and armory of our flesh.” And when Dubus refers in passing to “the archeologists of the heart,” he might be describing himself and his restless search for moral order in a world of chaos and squalor.

While it’s true that “Broken Vessels” amounts to a heart-rending lament, Dubus does not come across as a whiner. He celebrates the redemptive moments that reveal “the infinite possibilities of the human heart,” whether it’s the generous smile of a woman he passes on a New York street, an encounter with a ghost aboard a haunted aircraft carrier, or the roadside heroism he displayed on the night of his fateful accident.

Thus, when describing the months leading to the breakup of his marriage and the loss of custody of his young daughters, Dubus recalls a harrowing bout of diarrhea during which he was forced to rely on his wife’s care. He describes it as “a long time of grace given us in the hospital and at home, a time of love near death and with crippling, a time when my body could do little but lie still and receive, and when her every act was of the spirit, for every act was one of love. . . .”

He is capable of both lyrical and punishingly harsh prose, sometimes in the very same essay. In a meditation on friendship and death, for example, he rhapsodizes about “twilight’s brush strokes of color,” and, only moments later, lapses into hard-boiled irony on the fleeting quality of life: “A good bar clock,” he observes, “is always fast.”

At one point in “Broken Vessels,” in recalling his encounters with not one but two ghosts, he describes “some state that was not anxiety, and certainly not peace, but excited curiosity, and wonder.”

That peculiar state of mind is much at work here, and we begin to recognize it as an alchemic formula by which Dubus seeks to turn the leaden experiences of life--separation and estrangement, dread and anxiety, failed love and lost love, disfiguring physical injury to himself and to his brothers-in-arms and even to his young daughter--into gold, or at least a strange kind of golden light.

Next: Digby Diehl reviews “Flying Hero Class” by Thomas Keneally (Warner Books) .