SOURCE: "The Progress from Hunger to Love: Three Novellas by Andre Dubus," in The Hollins Critic, Vol. XXIV, No. 1, February, 1987, pp. 2-9.

Kennedy is an American author and critic whose Andre Dubus: A Study of the Short Fiction was published in 1988. In the following essay, Kennedy traces the theme of progressing from solitude to love in three of Dubus's novellas.

The fiction of Andre Dubus began to appear in the 1960s, a decade whose leading new writers were anything but realists. To the sixties, the very concept of an objective, comprehensible reality was suspect, a house of lies hammered together of truisms, party promises, and straight-faced socio-political lunacies, a place as contrived as the linear fiction so many of the decade's writers sought to escape.

Overloaded perhaps with the quotidian gore of foreign war and domestic strife being spewed forth daily by the media, many American fiction writers...