The American Century: Literature since 1945 807hot coffee through her jeans onto her thigh.” Her thigh is burned, and her
half-hearted attempt to nerve herself up for the day, and for her life, collapses into a
mix of panic and venom.
Andre Dubus III presents us with characters who are driven into corners. They
make choices that somehow seem mysterious to them, because those choices are the
products of circumstances over which, it seems, they have little control. Having
embarked on a course of action – almost, it appears, without an act of volition
preceding it – they are hurried along to the eventual consequences like feverish
sleepwalkers. Hoping for the best, they usually encounter the worst: that spilled cup
of coffee is a painful reminder that, even if planning were an option, things rarely if
ever turn out as they are planned. It seems unlikely that Franny will be “fine” – as it
happens, she is not; still, having wiped the hot coffee off her thighs with a tissue,
April careers on toward the club and disaster. There is no time for reflection, still less
for turning back; she just turns to the next stage in a series of events in which, it
appears, she has no agency. If there is someone or something in control here, it is
certainly not her. That is the case with the other characters in this novel, set a few
days before 9/11. So, one of the other major players in this game The Garden of Last
Days describes is A.J., a heavy-equipment operator who feels misunderstood by his
boss, his wife (from whom he is estranged), and the stripper whom he visits
obsessively at the Puma Club. A.J. dreams of living in the Everglades with his son
Cole. He is visiting the club on the night April feels forced to take her daughter there.
Unhappy that the object of his desires will not see him when she has finished work,
A.J. makes the mistake of touching her arm, violating the club rules. A bouncer ejects
him, in the process breaking his wrist. After buying a pint of Wild Turkey to console
himself and alleviate the pain of the broken wrist, full of rage and a sense of grievance
A.J. returns to the club. His aim, evidently, is some kind of revenge. But he comes
across Franny, unattended, in a back room. His first instinct is to protect her. Then,
confused by drink, by resentment that he cannot get near his own child now that he
is separated and by the thought that he has already compromised himself by paying
close attention in the back of a strip joint to a 3-year-old girl he does not know, he
embarks on rescuing Franny from her seedy surroundings. What exactly he intends
to do is unclear, even to himself; however, he ends up with Franny in the back of his
pick-up truck. At certain moments his brain engages enough with what is happening
for him to realize that nobody is going to believe that he was just trying to help the
small girl, that this is not an abduction. But the die in this particular part of the game
is already cast. Almost without knowing it, A.J. has embarked on a course of action
that will lead him to jail. Franny eventually is recovered, after a panicked A.J. leaves
her in a parked car. But A.J. will end up serving a long sentence. This time, the
consequences – both for A.J. and for April – are more than just spilled coffee.
And then there is Bassam al-jizani, a young man from Saudi Arabia. Things
scarcely make sense to Bassam. Like the other characters in and around the Puma
Club, he appears to be groping toward a revelation, looking for an epiphany that
never occurs. At the club just before he embarks on the 9/11 terrorist attack for
which, in the past few months, he has been training, Bassam is drinking heavily,GGray_c05.indd 807ray_c 05 .indd 807 8 8/1/2011 7:31:46 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 46 PM