Hope Against Hope

The sand of the title is the Third World or, specifically, Iran. The fog is America or, specifically, the San Francisco Bay Area. The house is everything people have struggled over through history’s shifting tides and fortunes: survival, possession, identity, pride.

Or, specifically, it is an unremarkable waterside bungalow in dispute between a hard-pressed young American woman and an immigrant, a former colonel in Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi’s air force.

This is the substratum of the novel by Andre Dubus III, the remarkable and distinctive writer-son of the quite differently remarkable and distinctive novelist Andre Dubus. (One can see a genetic link, though--not in looks or style, but in a voracious appetite for the emotional fundamentals of the world around.) It is a substratum only hinted at in fleeting images and reflections, but it nourishes other levels of the story with a significance beyond their own graceful energy.

Two innocences are headed for dreadful collision in the persons of Kathy Nicolo, 30 years old and still a waif, and Col. Mahsoud Behrani, a disarmed soldier who--despite a fierce habit of command--is a waif as well.

With her husband, Kathy had fled west from their drugged-out, dead-end Massachusetts past to make a new life; then he abandoned her. She cleans other people’s houses; her sole possession the East Bay bungalow left to her by her father.

The colonel had fled the wreckage of what could be thought of as another kind of drug-fumed and unsustainable circumstance: the inconceivable power and privilege of a high officer under the shah. Came the revolution, Behrani loaded his wife and two children into a bomber together with 30 fine suits, Mrs. Behrani’s elegant wardrobe, crystal champagne flutes, photographs of himself and the shah, and a suitcase containing $280,000 in cash.

He too traveled west, in this case via Bahrain and Paris and ultimately to California. Three years later, most of the cash gone, he picks up highway trash by day, works in a convenience store at night and plans to recoup his fortune in what he conceives of as the American way of real estate trading.

Unbeknown to Kathy--she is too depressed and distracted to open her mail--the county has ordered her house seized for nonpayment of taxes. It is a mistake, but before she can find the papers to prove it, a sheriff’s squad has evicted her, the place has been put up for tax auction, and Behrani has bought it with the last $45,000 left in his suitcase.

The house is worth three or four times that. The colonel dreams of a future of many such deals, of a wife who will again respect him, a son he will be able to send to college and the esteem of his prosperous fellow exiles as well as his own. As for Kathy, she too has a dream: of rebuilding her shattered life in her home with a man she has just met.

The most rending kind of war is not between two hatreds, but between two hopes. Kathy and the colonel go into battle with both justice and unreason on either side and a finally garish violence, but it is the hopes that tear our hearts. As tension and suspense grow, the urgency to know what will happen is overtaken by an urgency not to. Two ships head for each other in the night; on each, the passengers dine and dance and plan for arrival. We cannot bear to watch their collision.

Dubus sets out the growing confrontation with chilly ingenuity and a remarkably observant compassion. The knot is stubbornly resistant. It is entirely unjust for Kathy to lose her house because of a government error; it is also a tragedy because it is all she has.

But it is unjust in a different way for an immigrant trying to make his way by the rules of his new country to play by those rules (keep striking and maybe you strike it rich) and lose. True, what Behrani would lose is not the money he paid--he would get it back--but the prospect of what it would earn him. Imagine, though, John D. Rockefeller having his oil wells snatched back for what they cost.

The author writes a series of splendidly vivid scenes. There is Kathy’s disbelief when the sheriff’s squad bursts in and changes her locks, and later, having found her papers and assuming things will be all right, returning to find carpenters ripping off the roof to install a veranda. She cuts her foot on the debris; Behrani’s wife, ignorant of the dispute, tenderly dresses the wound. Despite her frightened fury, Kathy finds her own kindness and makes up a reason for the visit.

Behrani, having received a notice from Kathy’s legal aid lawyer, dresses up in his finest suit--a warrior attaching his plumes--to visit her. A courteous foreign formality battles a courteous Californian informality. Behrani refuses the lawyer’s offer to repay him with the county’s refund and insists on the 300% profit he had been assured of by local real estate agents. He dismisses the argument that Kathy has been wronged.

“Of course you do not understand what I have said. I am the rightful owner of the property, I am being wronged.” Right there, in that “of course you do not understand,” is the heart of the conflict. It is between not just two people, but two strata of what the United States is becoming: the immigrant and the settled.

It is Dubus’ subtlety--and a widening of his message--that Kathy, ostensibly one of the settled, is in fact attempting to re-immigrate into American society after her druggy dropout. And that her outraged sense of unjust displacement is, for opposite reasons, not far from that of the colonel’s. And, finally, that the author lets us glimpse, in both, moments of compunction and moral regret.

I have two quibbles with this fine and prophetic novel (a prophecy conveyed not by pronouncement, but by the detailed turn of a wrist, the intonation of a phrase, the daily miscalculations of rival dreams). One is Dubus’ practice of inserting Persian phrases into the colonel’s speech, followed by an English translation. No one ever speaks that way, of course, so we are momentarily jarred from the rapt belief that the author’s keenness inspires. In fact, the slight musical distortions of the colonel’s otherwise excellent English do all that is needed to affirm his Persian identity.

The second quibble is oddly related. The last part of the book descends into madness and extreme violence. It is all amply foreshadowed and beautifully written. The madness, for example, is not arbitrary; it is the paranoid miscalculation of sane people suddenly out of their depths--particularly that of Kathy’s otherwise gentle lover.

Certainly the climactic explosion is well done. But the rest of the book--the rich texture into which the unforgettable Col. Behrani is woven, and Kathy’s plainer, movingly bereft landscape--is so good as to be jarred without need. Dubus, a young writer, is better than perhaps even he knows. There is nothing wrong with a theatrically flaming dessert, particularly when so well prepared. But a meal of such memorable subtlety deserves something simpler and less agitated. A dying fall, if you like; but the lives and conditions that Dubus has explored so vividly and with such refinement earn their dying.