SOURCE: "Taking a Chance on Pathos," in The New York Times Book Review, November 6, 1988, p. 7.

In the following review of Selected Stories, Hoffman suggests that everyday objects, circumstances, and relationships transcend the ordinary in Dubus's fictional explorations of love and its corruption.

Emotional veracity is surely one of the most elusive elements in fiction. Just how do we decide that we trust a writer's voice? The sound of authentic feeling is different for each writer, and it cannot be easily parsed; and yet it is what determines whether we decide to put ourselves in an author's hands, or to balk at even the most brilliant insights or the most touching incidents or the most unexceptionable views. Andre Dubus is a writer whose work depends almost entirely on the persuasiveness of that sound. He consistently forgoes cleverness, formal rigor and any number of special effects. His note is a...