T A B L E+T A L K Who are your favorite literary critics? What qualities do you look for in a reviewer? Join the discussion in the Books area of Table Talk R E C E N T L Y Be Sweet By Roy Blount Jr. Nonfiction (06/01/98) Now It's Time to Say Goodbye By Dale Peck Fiction (05/29/98) The Treatment By Daniel Menaker Fiction (05/28/98) The Overspent American By Juliet B. Schor Nonfiction (05/27/98) I Know This Much Is True By Wally Lamb Fiction (05/26/98) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - SEARCH REVIEWS BY: title of book author publisher reviewer F E A T U R E Punch drunk By Vivian Gornick Norman Mailer's collected essays reveal the sad legacy of a writer who couldn't stop fighting (05/27/98)		meditations from a movable Chair BY ANDRE DUBUS KNOPF NONFICTION 210 PAGES BY ANDREW O'HEHIR | It's entirely misguided to call Andre Dubus a minimalist, although his chosen form in this book is the short essay, no more than a few pages long, almost always about the ordinary events of his life. Indeed, Dubus, both as an essayist and an author of short stories, is about as maximal as you can get. His subjects are pretty much everything that those of us who came of age after the Kennedys, after Watergate, are too embarrassed to talk about: God, love, art and writing, fatherhood and manhood, the sacredness of the human body and human life. He's a writer's writer, unafraid to take the kinds of chances that can steal your breath away or, if you're feeling uncharitable, seem slightly ridiculous (as when, in "Sacraments," he lists trimming liverwurst for his daughters' sandwiches among the sacraments of his day). Much of "Meditations From a Movable Chair," including its title, is haunted by the accident in 1986 when Dubus, then 49, was struck by a car, costing him one leg and severely damaging the other. He is too honest and brave a writer to pretend that the accident did not change him in fundamental ways (just as his marriages and divorces and the births of his six children have also changed him) or that he did not suffer from self-pity and despair as well as excruciating physical pain while recovering from it. He consistently describes himself as "crippled," and despises the journalistic clichés that are invariably hauled out to discuss the disabled: "To view human suffering as an abstraction, as a statement about how plucky we all are," he writes in "Song of Pity," "is to blow air through brass while the boys and girls march in parade off to war. Seeing the flesh as only a challenge to the spirit is as false as seeing the spirit as only a challenge to the flesh." There were moments, while I read this book, when I felt alienated from Dubus' full-hearted, masculine sensibility, when it struck me as a little pompous and writerly. I even wondered whether I would actually like him if I met him (even though he loves baseball, opera, Frank Sinatra and Bergman films, all undeniably high on the list of things that make life worth living). His passionate belief in the Catholic church and its rituals -- although it's obviously genuine and he writes about it beautifully in such essays as "Love in the Morning" and "Communion" -- is just as puzzling to an arm's-length lapsed Catholic like me as a belief in UFO abductions or a flat earth. But I always felt honored to be in Dubus' company, and chastened by his wisdom, his powers of observation and his masterly command of craft. Within the space of 21 pages, he pulls off a dark-comic essay about the New York publishing world ("Mailer at the Algonquin") and a heartbreaking essay about baseball ("Brothers," which originally appeared in Salon), both among the finest I've ever read on those worked-over subjects. For any writer, this will be one of those books you read and reread, photocopy for your friends, come to terms with over the years and carry with you from house to house until you die. SALON | June 2, 1998 Andrew O'Hehir writes regularly for Salon.