And Andre, as he puts it, teaches himself to hurt people. His older sister begins selling drugs his brother begins sleeping with his high school teacher his younger sister, at twelve, installs a padlock on her bedroom door. Even with the money his father sends there’s never enough good food. After his writer father leaves, his mother moves Andre and his three siblings from tough neighborhood to tough neighborhood. Meanwhile the lives of the people around him are falling apart. When his sister tells him that the girls are beginning to notice him, he sees her comment as “beside the point.” He is busy preparing to defend himself, his life, and the lives of the people around him. He works past exhaustion, and then he keeps working. Dubus details these workouts as though the information were hard-wired into his body-which I suppose, on some level, it is. You hear me?”Īnd so begin the pull-ups, the bench presses, the push-ups. “I don’t care if you get your face beat in, I don’t care if you get kicked in the head or stabbed or even shot, I will never allow you not to fight back ever again. Still scrawny at fourteen, he tells himself:

(I’m not giving much away: a whole lot happens in the middle, and the final scene in which Dubus peels himself away from the urge to fight is lovely and stirring.)Īndre Dubus III spends his boyhood getting beat up a lot. In the end, it’s about learning not to fight.

But it’s mostly about fighting: wanting to fight, learning to fight, training to fight, getting in fights. Townieis a book about fighting and writing.

Townie novel