Editors’ note: A version of this essay will appear in Andre Dubus: A Literary Life by Patrick Samway, S.J., to be published by University Press of Mississippi in August 2026.
Andre Dubus, a native of Louisiana who taught literature for 18 years at Bradford College in Haverhill, Mass., has long been recognized by his peers as a master of the short story and novella.
All his works have been published by David R. Godine in an impressive three-volume collection. Among Dubus’s honors are two Guggenheim grants, a PEN/Malamud Award, a Rea Award for the Short Story and a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant.” In addition, “In the Bedroom,” a film based on Dubus’s story “Killings” and starring Sissy Spacek, Nick Stahl, Marisa Tomei and Tom Wilkinson, not only premiered at the Sundance Film Festival but went on to earn five Academy Award nominations, including Best Adapted Screenplay for writers Todd Field and Robert Festinger.
Part of Dubus’s brilliance is his willingness to tackle complex theological issues through the voices of ordinary people, as he wonderfully demonstrates in “A Father’s Story,” first published in the Black Warrior Review in 1983 and collected in The Times Are Never So Bad the same year.
A lifelong Catholic, Dubus constantly wrote about the truths of the human heart that most make credible sense, due in large measure to the ordinary characters he created and the convincing—albeit often bizarre—situations they find themselves in. As he once told me, he often withdrew as best he could from the daily preoccupations of his life and entered the unyielding, mundane experiences of the characters he was in the act of creating. He believed that art is inherently intimate.
For Dubus, writing became a question of deciphering what was happening in the lives of his characters and translating that for others to see and understand. At the same time, he tried to remain outwardly estranged from himself in order to gradually broach the deepest recesses of his own psyche. While he might sense the direction a particular story was taking, inspired perhaps by a conversation overheard in a restaurant involving a marital dilemma with multiple dimensions, he usually had no precise roadmap to offer his characters. Word by word, phrase by phrase, page by page, he followed the leads given to him.
As a former Marine, all Dubus needed was the discipline to report for duty every day and to achieve the depth of concentration that would allow a character to become the flesh of Andre Dubus, who no longer remembered he had a name. Through the power of his imagination, Dubus had the uncanny ability to synthesize and reconcile disparate elements in his characters and stories—which sometimes had no resolution. In short, he had to open up his heart and put aside all his personal preoccupations, prejudices and preconceptions. His imagination touched the depths of our humanity, probed the here and now, the ordinary and extraordinary, to depict situations in which human beings, created in the image of God, have the freedom to choose among the good, the lesser good and even, alas, evil.
Father and Daughter
In “A Father’s Story,” one of Dubus’s best, Luke Ripley is a divorced stable owner and father in his mid-50s. Jennifer, his 20-year-old daughter, accidentally runs down a stranger, Patrick Mitchell, while returning to her father’s house after having a night out with two friends. After the daughter informs him of the accident, Luke drives to the scene of the crime and finds Mitchell’s body; he is unable, however, to determine whether Mitchell is alive or dead. In order to protect Jennifer from possible arrest, Luke subsequently drives her car to the local Catholic church and crashes it into a tree near the rectory, thereby destroying any potentially damaging evidence.
Though the ruddy-faced, 64-year-old parish priest, Father Paul LeBoeuf, has regularly heard Luke’s confession over the years, he never learns the motive behind Luke’s destruction of his daughter’s car, either in the privacy of the confessional or during one of their Wednesday evening dinners. Father Paul continues to go to Luke’s house for dinner and to hear his confession (including concerning two sexual liaisons). Nor does Luke stop being a communicant at daily Mass, a ritual that has been important to him since childhood. Luke has a friend in Father Paul who clearly knows and respects the boundaries of their relationship.
Luke’s instinct is to offer his daughter an opportunity to lead a presumably normal life after he has covered up her involvement in the tragic accident, one in which he himself could be accused of being a co-conspirator for not informing the proper authorities at a time when Mitchell might still have been alive. “It is a world of secrets,” Luke reflects to himself, “and now I have one from my best, in truth my only, friend”—that is, God:
When I received the Eucharist while Jennifer’s car sat twice-damaged, so redeemed, in the rain, I felt neither loneliness nor shame, but as though He were watching me, even from my tongue, intestines, blood, as I have watched my sons at times in their young lives when I was able to judge but without anger, and so keep silent while they, in the agony of their youth, decided how they must act; or found reasons, after their actions, for what they had done. Their reasons were never as good or as bad as their actions, but they needed to find them, to believe they were living by them, instead of the awful solitude of the heart.
Luke’s love for Jennifer reaches a level that provides a spiritual trap for Dubus’s readers about how and in what ways God loves human beings. By the end of the story, the reader can only guess how Father Paul might have reacted had he known what Luke had done to protect his daughter. Luke changes tremendously (the emphasis of the story), but not so Father LeBoeuf, whom we presume carries on with his life as a faithful parish priest.
Dubus told interviewer Kay Bonetti in 1984 that he was “interested in the question of hit-and-run. I know what the civil laws say, but what is the moral responsibility? If, in fact, the person is dead, there is not much you can do except turn yourself in. That was the premise. That was not an answer. That was a question. I start most stories with a question, with an ‘if.’ And then I go after that ‘if’.” Dubus initially wrote the first scene as the actual accident but soon realized it was a “stupid” thing to do.
Dubus first considered having the driver of the car in the story be a young man, but then he decided it should be a daughter because the father would treat her differently: “But I didn’t know how to make that part of his conflict.” He wanted to write about a man of faith, and then one day decided to make the man of faith the father of a guilty child. “And that excited me.”
The Father and the Son
After reading William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience (important in Dubus’s story because of the narrator’s short discourse with God the Father) and teaching Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling at Bradford College, Dubus took to heart unsettling words in St. Paul’s Letter to the Philippians: “Therefore, my dear friends, as you have always obeyed—not only in my presence, but now much more in my absence—continue to work out your salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you to will and to act in order to fulfill his good purpose” [emphasis mine].
Once the action in the story started, Dubus just hung on for dear life as his characters asserted their own voices. As Dubus reflected on the story, Luke told him “what was wrong, not to confront the family. He told me all sorts of things about the pope. I loved spending time with him.”
Overall, the story gestated for four years, but the actual writing took only about six weeks. In the Bonetti interview, Dubus remembered that he had written that Luke thought about subordinating ritual to feeling, but he changed his mind:
The precise thing that deepens the story is the fact that there is a subtext…what is now going to happen to this girl. What type of human being is he sending her out in the world to be…. He was able to restore his bond with his daughter, but what remains at the end of the story is “At what price has he done that?”
The story’s resolution exists in Luke’s final, poignant, 29-line dialogue with God. Because of his act to save his daughter, Luke understandably does not feel at peace with God, the earth or anyone on it, including himself. When his daughter woke him to tell him what she had done on the night of the accident, he reacted not as one might expect of a law-abiding citizen, let alone of a faithful receiver of the Eucharist, but as a father of a girl responsible for the death of another human being. Thus, his subsequent prayer took on a new dimension:
And He says: I am a Father too.
Yes, I say, as You are a Son Whom this morning I will receive; unless You kill me on the way to church, then I trust You will receive me. And as a Son You made Your plea.
Yes, He says, but I would not lift the cup.
Three things are worth noting. First, God, depicted here as both Father and Son (that is, as two of the three persons of the divine Trinity), seemingly has an independence of his own and is not some projection of Luke’s thoughts. Second, God and Luke speak to one another forthrightly, as equals in conversation but not, as Luke acknowledges, as equals in the order of creation or salvation, as signaled by the narrator’s use of upper-case letters to begin words referring to the deity. Third, each allows the other to speak and respond freely, without either usurping control of the conversation or lecturing the other.
Initially, God and Luke establish a common ground: Both are fathers. Sensing that God’s fatherhood might have a theological advantage, however, Luke addresses God—Jesus, the second person of the Trinity, someone whose presence he will receive in Eucharistic form that morning unless Jesus kills him on his way to church—in which case, he hopes that God would receive him right away into his kingdom.
While acknowledging his spiritual bond to his savior in the Eucharist, Luke, by using the word “kill,” suddenly and unexpectedly casts Jesus in the role of a potential murderer. Through faith, Luke believes that the death of an individual, including his own, is known to God and is part of God’s mysterious plan for all his creatures. Yet, he momentarily places Jesus in the position of someone who could kill another—exactly what Jennifer actually did.
At some point, God will summon Luke to come to him to be judged about how he lived his life on earth. No Christian would consider this summons a form of murder. God knows when his creatures will die and allows their deaths to take place, but he does not cause the demise of their human existence.
How would God the Father feel, one might ask, if he knew that his Son had purposely terminated the life of one of his creatures? Could and would the Father, hypostatically united with the Son, ever lessen, even by the smallest bit, his love for his Son? He certainly would not want the Son to be condemned to death for murdering someone else.
Even when Jesus was about to be tried and put to death, he asked that the Father bring to completion what the Father willed (Mk 14:35-37; Mt 26:39-40; Lk 22:41-44). He initially asked his Father to spare him from having to drink the cup of suffering and death, but he finally acquiesced, once assured by an angel that in doing so he was following the Father’s will. In “A Father’s Story,” Jesus says he “would not lift the cup,” meaning that if it was not possible for the cup to be taken away from him without his drinking from it, he would willingly accept the consequences of death for the redemption of all humanity.
Neither does Luke want God to take away the bitter cup he must live with. Had one of Luke’s three sons become involved in a similar incident, he would have called the police and told them to rush a team of medics to the scene. God further questions Luke on this point: “Why? Do you love them less?” “No,” Luke answers, but because he “could bear the pain of watching and knowing my sons’ pain.”
Luke’s final parry carries with it a barb deliberately meant to wound God: “But You never had a daughter and, if You had, You could not have borne her passion.” If it is true that a father is more protective of daughters than of sons, then Luke not-so-subtly tells God that he cannot understand Luke’s intense love for Jennifer.
What, God blindsided by a human father’s love for his daughter? “So,” a seemingly offended God retorts in this story, “you love her more than you love Me.” To which Luke replies, “I love her more than I love truth.” “Then you love in weakness,” God says. Luke ends the conversation by saying in a condescending way, “As You love me….”
Luke does not believe he loves Jennifer out of weakness, but if he did, then his love, wherever it lies on the human-divine spectrum of love, not only mirrors but participates in God’s love for him. From an a priori theological perspective, God’s love cannot be anything less than infinite, something God would be bound to admit had the conversation continued.
This brilliant series of rejoinders at the story’s end, each an assertion by a bold ego, transpires so quickly that the reader has difficulty absorbing either the interior logic or the implied theology. The seemingly familiar yet atonal nature of the story’s conclusion has gone beyond the boundaries of a typical Dubus story. In God’s implied silence, however, Luke has his answer in what literary critic Thomas Kennedy calls “a private peace with God” and thus the loving justification of his action to protect his daughter.
Though a devout Catholic, Dubus had no intention of writing uplifting fiction that might teach inspirational catechetical lessons. He left that for others to do, if they wished to do so.
The question could well be asked: Can one be at peace with the Triune God who seems alienated from his subject? The choices Luke made as father, husband and lover have, at times, been less than exemplary, yet he takes comfort in one of Father LeBoeuf’s dicta: “Belief is believing in God; faith is believing that God believes in you.” Platitudes, especially in this case spiritual ones, need not be the sole engine that drives one’s life.
Dubus perceived that more is at stake in this story if Luke is to continue to grow. Knowing that Luke will not give up his daily prayers or his participation in the Eucharistic banquet, we nevertheless sense that he will continue to wrestle with his conscience in that arena where the human encounters the divine, where even mystics have collapsed in tearful exhaustion. As God became incarnate in Jesus—whom the Gospel according to St. John declares to be the Messiah and the Son of God, as well as depicting him not only as the Word made flesh—so too can the human imagination probe the finite, the particular and even evil deeds as a way of probing the mysteries of the infinite God.
Thus, theologically speaking, Dubus embraces the world even during moments of great despair as a participation in God’s mysterious plan for his people as they travel among specific, unsettling events in their lives toward the horizon of the eternal moment.
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