Gone So Long: A Novel
Staff Reviews
It has been 40 years since Daniel Ahern last saw his daughter, Susan. She was just three years old when she was snatched from his arms before Daniel was cuffed and marched away by the police. He spent 15 years in prison. Since his release, he has built a new life refurbishing furniture in the mornings, and volunteering as a driver for old and infirm residents of a neighboring town in the afternoons. It’s a simple life, but satisfying in its routine.
After being taken from Daniel, Susan was raised by her grandmother, Lois. To explain the absence of Susan’s parents from her life, Lois has told Susan that they died when their car crashed off a bridge into a river. As a teenager, she learns the truth for the first time. The knowledge shatters her sense of security, and her life descends into a series of brief and chaotic relationships with unsuitable men.
Married for three years to Bobby Dunn, her uncertainties rise again – can someone with such a tragic background ever find love? She takes refuge with Lois, telling Bobby she needs the time and space to work on a novel. Instead, she carefully unpeels the long-buried memories of her childhood, discovering new insights into who she is and why.
Now, Daniel is dying and he has unfinished business with his daughter. It's time to set his affairs in order. He writes Susan a letter and sets off on the three-day journey south to Florida where she lives.
This is a powerful and compelling novel. Dubus writes with great intensity. With a few deft sentences he conjures up scenes so vivid it is as if you are there. His characters are real and heartfelt; their pain and self-doubt are almost tangible. The tension rises thrillingly as the main characters approach the denouement. But will Susan and Daniel find peace?
Andre Dubus III is a faculty member at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell. His novel, House of Sand and Fog, was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1999. He lives in Newbury, Massachusetts, with his wife and three children.
Precision of language, artistry of plot. The author plays no favorites with the three main characters (Daniel, who killed his former wife, Linda, in a fit of rage; Susan, who witnessed the homicide decades earlier; and Lois, Linda’s mother, who raised Susan). Each character and storyline is fully developed, giving the reader a great sense of how and why they are who they are. I felt empathy for each of them (yes, even a man who killed his wife!) and read the book on the edge of my seat!
Description
Andre Dubus III’s first novel in a decade is a masterpiece of thrilling tension and heartrending empathy.
Few writers can enter their characters so completely or evoke their lives as viscerally as Andre Dubus III. In this deeply compelling new novel, a father, estranged for the worst of reasons, is driven to seek out the daughter he has not seen in decades.
Daniel Ahearn lives a quiet, solitary existence in a seaside New England town. Forty years ago, following a shocking act of impulsive violence on his part, his daughter, Susan, was ripped from his arms by police. Now in her forties, Susan still suffers from the trauma of a night she doesn’t remember, as she struggles to feel settled, to love a man and create something that lasts. Lois, her maternal grandmother who raised her, tries to find peace in her antique shop in a quaint Florida town but cannot escape her own anger, bitterness, and fear.
Cathartic, affirming, and steeped in the empathy and precise observations of character for which Dubus is celebrated, Gone So Long explores how the wounds of the past afflict the people we become, and probes the limits of recovery and absolution.
Praise for Gone So Long: A Novel
Gone So Long is an astonishment. I love this book so much, the humanity in it. I love every single person in it, they are so real, these people—I know them and love them all. I wept for them, I did. Dubus is just so good and real and true, he doesn’t pull one sentimental punch the whole time—extraordinary. I thought about those people as I was walking down the sidewalk, and they are inside me as well, not just thoughts that go by. I love this book to pieces.
— Elizabeth Strout, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Olive Kitteridge
I tore through this haunting novel about people driven by pain beyond the reach of love and forgiveness, and the roads they use as they seek their way back. It hits just the right note at the end, and I’ll be thinking about Susan a long time. A hell of a read.
— Phil Klay, National Book Award–winning author of Redeployment
Well, he’s done it again, hasn't he? What a gorgeous heartbreaker of a book. Dubus’s compassion is unsentimental and unblinking, total and unwavering. That and sheer artistry makes Gone So Long dark and radiant, beautiful and never to be forgotten.
— Paul Harding, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Tinkers
Rings with authenticity and evokes the texture of working-class lives. . . . This is a compassionate and wonderful novel.
— Publishers Weekly (starred)
A dark and exquisitely crafted novel that views parental relationships as both a form of inherited violence and redemptive empathy.
— Library Journal (starred)
Dubus is in his gritty wheelhouse, exploring the
question of how we live with our mistakes and whether we can ever stop adding
to them.
— Kirkus Reviews
Dubus evokes a dazzling
palette of emotions as he skillfully unpacks the psychological tensions between
remorse and guilt, fear and forgiveness, anger and love. Susan, Daniel, and
Lois are fully realized and authentic characters who live with pain and
heartache while struggling to fill the tremendous void created by the tragedy.
Heartrending yet unsentimental, this powerful testament to the human spirit
asks what it means to atone for the unforgivable and to empathize with the
broken.
— Booklist
