It would not be inaccurate to call Andre Dubus an old-fashioned writer, for … he writes plotted stories about recognizable human beings in a language that, however highly polished, is nonetheless the English that you and I speak. Dubus is good at it—so good, in fact, that if the seven short stories and the novella that make up Separate Flights are your introduction to his work, as they were for me, you're apt to wonder where he's been hiding. He hasn't, of course—no more than any other purveyor of fictional subtleties in an age that prefers journalism and being kicked in the teeth.

But in another sense Dubus isn't old-fashioned at all. In the emotional weave of American literature, resignation is a minor strand, a barely visible warp in so much aspiration and struggle. One went down fighting, like Ahab, despairing, like Gatsby, or at least babbling...