Less Is So Much More

Good fiction rarely translates into good movies. This is a tired bit of truth, but it’s still a truth. How do you film a voice? How do you film the unsaid thoughts and ripples of feeling that make us who we are? It’s possible for a character in a story to have the most important moment of her life while lying in bed alone: How do you put that across on screen without resorting to some portentous voice-over?

But once in a while a movie gets it right, and “In the Bedroom” is that movie. It somehow re-creates the moral atmosphere and emotional texture of its source--the late Andre Dubus’ story “Killings”--without trying to be literature; from first to last it’s a movie, and a damned good movie, maybe even a great movie. Now the director, Todd Field, has taken the trouble to thank Dubus for his inspirational work by gathering seven of his stories together under the title of the film. I hope--as Field obviously does--that this will have the effect of drawing some of the movie’s many admirers to this great writer.

With the exception of an early novel, “The Lieutenant,” Dubus devoted himself to the short story, and his best achievements in that form belong on the same shelf with those of his teachers Chekhov and Hemingway. The stories in this book show him in the fullness of his voice, his humanity and range; and each is a masterpiece of its kind.

Reading through them ensemble, I was struck by their plenitude. Part of the pleasure of writing short stories is learning what you can live without. The form relies on an acute, watchful reader--an aficionado, really--who is insulted by fat explanation, fat description, by anything reducible to something more essential; but the consciousness of that scrutiny can lead to a chill, starved sort of story in which the writer seems hesitant to tell you anything at all for fear of being common. I know; I’ve written a few.

Dubus never succumbed to this anorexic impulse. His language is full-throated, and he’s not afraid to linger on the undramatic, even languorous moments in which we define ourselves--conversation over a barbecue, a divorced father driving home alone after dropping off his kids. Dubus takes his time; his stories, like his sentences, tend to run long. But that vigilant reader prowling the flock for bloated stragglers will never catch Dubus out, because at his most complex, he is still irreducible.

Look at this passage from “The Winter Father,” in which the newly divorced father imagines a place where men like him can take their kids on weekends: “A place of swimming pools, badminton and tennis courts, movie theaters, restaurants, soda fountains, batting cages, a zoo, an art gallery, a circus, aquarium, science museum, hundreds of restrooms, two always in sight....” It’s a list, yes, but you wouldn’t want to shrink it; its grimly comic progression heightens our sense of the father’s desperation to entertain children whose comfort in casual, unplanned intimacy has been destroyed by divorce. But from such a cascade of images, Dubus can effortlessly move to a rending, isolated moment, the father scraping the inside of his windshield the next morning and realizing that “the grey ice curling and falling from the glass was the frozen breath of his children.”

These are ordinary things, ordinary moments raised to the level of art by a luminous quality of attention that Dubus lavishes on his people as well. They are richly imagined, the women at least as vividly as the men--without a shade of male fantasy or condescension--and if he believed in evil people, he must not have found them very interesting, because they don’t figure much in his work. What he is interested in is our attempt to act rightly when the right is not clear, to secure justice in situations where one man’s good is another man’s ill.

“Killings” is a good example of this endless, unsatisfactory sorting-out. Another, my favorite, is “A Father’s Story.” In it the pious, amiable Luke Ripley stages a coverup for his daughter after a drunken car accident in which she kills a boy. Luke is acting out of love, the particular protective love of a father for a daughter, and so absolves himself of guilt, even comparing his love for her to God’s love for us. But what he cannot see is that in removing his daughter from the process of confession and punishment, he has isolated her forever from the human community, binding her in unexpiated guilt.

This is a dark, complex portrait of a man destroying his daughter in the name of love, never imagining that a greater love would allow her the freedom to act responsibly and redeem herself. A great story, it reveals in its ironies and self-contradictions that rare writer who can write at once passionately and unsentimentally of love, of its power to rescue us from the prison of self-regard and to blind us to the havoc we wreak in its service.