SOURCE: "These Days in the Holocene," in The Hudson Review, Vol. XXXIII, No. 4, Winter, 1980–81, pp. 575-88.

In the following excerpt, Perez offers a critical overview of Finding a Girl in America, suggesting that Dubus's stories provide a believable context for the dramatization of significant moral issues.

The stories in Andre Dubus's new collection, Finding a Girl in America,… often deal with losing, and with looking again for a girl in America. In one story, set before and during the Second World War, a man from Texas has a girl in his home town who seems ideal for him, but after he joins the Marines he gets to cherish his life with the troops, keeps her waiting for years, and finally cannot bring himself to marry her; he breaks her heart but the real loss, we are left in no doubt, is his. The greater loss seems to be...