SOURCE: "Playing Out the Patterns of Sin and Grace," in Commonweal, Vol. CXV, No. 21, December 2, 1988, pp. 652-56.

Breslin is an American author, educator, and Roman Catholic clergyman. In the following essay, he examines the influence of Catholicism on Dubus's fictional exploration of human relationships.

"I am fifty-one years old, yet I cannot feel I am growing older because I keep repeating the awakening experience of a child: I watch and I listen, I write in my journal, and each year I discover, with the awe of my boyhood, a part of the human spirit I had perhaps imagined, but had never seen or heard."

Thus the narrator of "Rose," the concluding story in Andre Dubus's collection (1986), The Last Worthless Evening. At some risk to my critical credentials, I find that narrative voice remarkably close to its author's and revelatory of the imagination that stands behind a considerable body...