SOURCE: "Going the Distance," in The Village Voice, Vol. XXXII, No. 3, January 20, 1987, pp. 50, 52.

In the following review, Lesser observes that in The Last Worthless Evening, Dubus goes beyond the geographic and thematic boundaries that evolved in his previous fiction to explore wider social issues and that the length and pacing of a novella is uniquely suited to Dubus's style.

With an author's first or second book, reviewers talk about promise; with a third or fourth, they speak of delivering on it. With his eighth book of fiction, Andre Dubus joins that small group of writers beyond the vocabulary of promise or even delivery—the ones who have settled in and are going the distance. In his previous story and novella collections, and his one short novel, Voices from the Moon, Dubus has carved out a territory recognizably his own: geographically, the towns north of Boston along the Merrimack...