SOURCE: "Reborn in a Wheelchair," in The New York Times Book Review, August 11, 1991, p. 9.

In the following review, Kriegel comments on the intensity of feeling and honesty found in Dubus's collection of personal essays, Broken Vessels.

I have never met Andre Dubus, although I think he is as good a writer of short fiction as anyone I have read over the last ten years. But after reading his first book of autobiographical essays, Broken Vessels, I think I know him. In fact, I think I know him fairly well, the way I think I know certain old friends with whom the intricate joinings of friendship have blessed both our mutual past and the language with which we share that past.

In his stories and novellas, collected in the volumes Separate Flights, Finding a Girl in America and Adultery and Other Choices, Mr. Dubus captures the contradictory demands of...