SOURCE: "Eavesdropping on the Quotidian," in The Nation, New York, Vol. 224, No. 8, February 26, 1977, pp. 248-50.

Lyons is an American author and critic. In the following review, he describes the stories in Separate Flights as snapshots of late twentieth-century American life and asserts that Dubus's fiction is characterized by finely crafted characters and believable circumstances.

Madison Avenue and the organized churches aside, marriage has few defenders these days, and if a social unit can be invented that will move more lawn mowers, console TV sets, station wagons and automatic corn poppers than the nuclear family, the only place you will be able to see a married couple will be on educational television. At first glance Andre Dubus's Separate Flights, published in 1975 seems to be one more brief for the prosecution. After ten years of marriage here is how the narrator and protagonist of the novella "We Don't Live Here...