Book: House of Sand and Fog
Author: Andre Dubus III
Published: 1999 (Vintage)
Pages: 365
This one was intense.
So imagine that you’re an Iranian immigrant, someone who was
really rich and important when you fled your country’s rebel fighters and
someone working three menial jobs at a time to keep up appearances in America.
You happen to see a good house for sale super-cheap by the county and on a very
impulsive, possibly stupid whim, you buy it to move you and your family into
until you can find a buyer who will pay retail for the whole shebang. It’s a
giant risk, but if it works (and it will work, it just has to work, you can
feel it almost as bone-deep as the weariness from your road work day job as it
sinks into your gas station night shift), it will save your family’s fortune,
spirits, and reputation all in one pile of cash, until the former owner starts
harassing you about her house she didn’t give you any sort of permission to
buy.
Got that? Okay.
Now imagine you’re a junkie just getting your life back
together in your dad’s old house. After he died and willed it to you and your
brother, your brother let you use it because hell, it’s not like he needed a
whole frickin’ house, and the whole family’s worried enough about you to give
you a second chance. You’ve slowly gotten settled into a routine that’s
building your new life around stuff that actually matters and doesn’t kill you,
when suddenly the county seizes the house for unpaid taxes addressed to your
recently ex-husband. You fight with what little resources you have, including a
pro bono attorney who gets more and more difficult to contact the more she
learns about the case and a sheriff you seduce at first for reasons so
practical you won’t even admit them to yourself. Later you really do fall in
love, but by then it’s too late and there’s nothing anyone can do without the
new owner’s permission.
So you’ve got these two people in your head. They hate each
other, they clash violently with each other, and they doom each other into a
Gorgian knot that tightens past bureaucratic annoyance to vendentta all the way
to personal understanding that breaks your heart because it’s too late. They’ve
cut the knot down the middle, each taking their own great hack, and everything
falls apart.
Details like the Iranian’s excellent but formal construction
of English and the flashbacks that revealed just enough at a time to drive the
recovering junkie’s motivation only where it was needed kept the voices unique
while drawing parallels to the growing helplessness on both sides.
I wanted the sheriff to have sections from his own
perspective because he gave up his entire family life to help the recovering
junkie, and you really only got whatever he told her, which was not much.
Bare-bones enough, though, and maybe the author didn’t want to stray off the
plot, but the sheriff’s unraveling marriage did play a pretty big part in the
action.
Wait until you’re fairly emotionally stable to read the end. I went from cringing at the horrible things humans are capable of doing to each other to gaping at the sacrifice some are willing to give to atone for those horrible things even though nothing will erase them.
