ON THE FIRST PAGE OF THE GARDEN of Last Days, a young stripper named April drives to work with a scalding hot cup of coffee between her legs. Even if she weren't about to bare her thighs, along with everything else, this wouldn't seem a great idea. B
ut it's all too indicative of how her night is going to go – and of April's judgment, or lack thereof. She's also a single mother who has strapped her three-year-old daughter into the car to take her to work. Within a couple of pages, April does a U-turn, with predictable results for her thighs.
Around the same time April is scalding herself, a young Saudi named Mansoor Bassam al-Jizani is driving toward the Puma Club, where she works, with an envelope containing $16,000 on the seat beside him. He has decided to "go into the evil place one last time where he will appear harmless". This sentiment, along with such predictions as "soon this will change, Allah willing" and lots of carping about "whores" and "kafir" (infidels), is the verbal equivalent of April's cup of coffee, or Chekhov's loaded gun. Even those ignorant of the 9/11 hijackers' penchant for strip clubs will probably find themselves engaged in some pretty serious racial profiling.
Most readers will be aware that The Garden of Last Days is the follow-up to House of Sand and Fog, Andre Dubus III's critically acclaimed bestseller, which was the basis for a 2003 film starring Jennifer Connelly and Ben Kingsley. In that novel, a recovering drug addict named Kathy Nicolo loses, through a bureaucratic error, the house she inherited from her father; the house is subsequently sold at auction to a former Iranian army colonel, Massoud Amir Behrani, who is struggling for his little slice of the American pie. Dubus masterly orchestrated the inexorable collision of these two, humanising both even as he made their stories seem as preordained as Clytemnestra's murder of Agamemnon. The Garden of Last Days makes use of a similar "strangers on a collision course" structure, but the new novel unreels in slow motion, and ultimately April's encounter with Bassam is nothing more than a glancing footnote to the terrible collision that reverberated around the world.
The main action of the book takes place a few days before 9/11. Dubus changes the names of the hijackers but otherwise closely follows what is known about the last days of the cell based in Florida that eventually hijacked one of the flights from Boston. He tells his story in a limited third-person narrative that verges on first person, alternating between the main characters – including Lonnie, a bouncer, and AJ, a patron of the strip club.
Perhaps inevitably, Bassam, the terrorist, is the least successful of these characters. Dubus has done his research, but he also wears it on his sleeve, and for all the Arabic words and phrases he deploys, Bassam seems to be the stereotypical resentful, sexually frustrated fanatic with a giant inferiority complex vis-a-vis the infidels. "You looked at their ... backsides, you heard their talk and their laughter and you watched them walk in their high shoes, and surely this was the first of many temptations from Shaytan himself. But you were steadfast." Dubus's attempts to render Bassam's stream of consciousness in a kind of Arabicinflected English often result in unintentional comedy. "This dancing woman upon the stage wears nothing but the hat of cowboys."
What Bassam shares with his American counterparts is a sense of victimhood; all seem like hapless pawns. April feels victimised by her stoner ex-husband, her mother and the strip club boss. No one has a bigger chip on his shoulder than AJ, a heavy-equipment operator who feels misunderstood by his boss, his wife and the stripper whom he obsessively visits at the Puma Club.
AJ dreams of living in the Everglades with his son, "the two of them swinging in a hammock behind mosquito netting, eating roasted gator and bobcat and manatee. Lounging around like naked warriors. And no women." Meanwhile, he is visiting the club on the night in question. Unhappy that the object of his affections won't see him after work, AJ makes the mistake of touching her arm – a violation of club rules. One of the bouncers is instantly upon him, breaking his wrist before ejecting him.
After buying a pint of Wild Turkey ("That and his F-150 were his only companions tonight, the only ones he could count on"), the enraged and intoxicated AJ returns to the club to exact revenge and ends up discovering April's three-year-old daughter unattended in a back room. His first instinct is to protect her. Next thing he knows, he's got the girl in the back of his pickup. At some point his brain engages with reality long enough to realise that no-one is going to believe he was just trying to help.
While AJ is carrying off her daughter, April is dancing in the VIP room for Bassam. If April's motives are transparent, Bassam's are only slightly less so. He wants what he's not supposed to want and convinces himself that it doesn't count with an infidel. (Later, the night before the hijacking, he and his friend hire a hooker.) He wants to know April's real name, but he also wants to humiliate her. Like AJ, Bassam fears and resents the power of women.
Dubus certainly tries to make April a sympathetic figure, but for all the time we spend inside her head, watching her preparing for her shift and following her through her night and the early morning hours, she remains a generic figure – a mother, a beauty, an unloved daughter. The rich specificity of the prose in Dubus's previous novel is seldom on display. In fact, the writing here frequently degenerates into cliché. "Her nipples stiffened and she felt strange; she felt shy. She felt naked." Reading this, it's hard to suppress the urge to yell – she is naked. Yes, I know, he means emotionally naked. I just wish he hadn't felt obliged to tell me.
Her grief and guilt when she discovers her child missing are plausible and moving, but Franny is discovered unharmed the next day, almost before April has had time to register the event. After all the foreshadowing and the omens, after the meticulously chronicled minutiae of April's working environment and AJ's unhappy marriage, the resolution of the abduction seems anticlimactic. It's as if in trying to develop the two story lines – Bassam's and AJ's – Dubus cannot quite commit fully to either.
April's encounter with Bassam ultimately has no great resonance in her life. When she hears the news a few days after her encounter with Bassam, April is as shocked and baffled by the events of 9/11 as any of us. She quits stripping, but her close encounter with one of the terrorists seems, finally, random and meaningless. Journalism needs only to tell us what happened; fiction, which deals in hypotheticals, has a higher threshold of truth.
• Andre Dubus III is at the Edinburgh book festival on 21 August.
The full article contains 1209 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
