Tom Lowe's identity and his pride are invested in the work he does with his back and his hands. Until, in a moment of fatigued inattention, shingling a roof in too-bright sunlight, he falls. In constant pain, addicted to painkillers at the cost of his relationships with his wife and son, Tom slowly comes to realize that he can never work again. If he is not a working man, who is he? He is not, he believes, the kind of person who lives in subsidized housing, though that is where he has ended up. He is not the kind of person who hatches a scheme to commit convenience-check fraud, together with neighbors he considers lowlifes, until he finds himself stealing his banker's trash.
Much like Tom, the first half of this novel is hard. Not hard to read, mind you. Dubus...is at the top of his game here, masterfully carrying the reader from the present action to Tom’s memories and dreams without confusion. The writing and the structure are clean and seamless ... In Such Kindness we remain squarely in Tom’s head, and Tom’s head is not an easy place to be. He’s a bit of a bummer to hang with, which he himself would almost eagerly admit. Still, every gritty, well-written disaster in the first half of this book is balanced by the transcendence of the novel’s ending ... At its core, this book is a hero’s journey, but not one where the hero ends up somewhere wildly different from where he starts. This is a story of acceptance. Hard-won, beautiful, life-changing acceptance.
Dubus brilliantly captures the ways chronic pain erodes the self ... Dubus is no fatalist; we are on a difficult journey of redemption. A series of small events leads to a series of tiny realizations. But there is no straight path, no Christian epiphany, only an agonizing upward spiral ... Tom becomes, then, an alternative model of masculinity. To figure out his place in this community, he will have to make himself vulnerable and soft rather than brittle and mean. Dubus, meanwhile, models this vulnerability by risking earnestness inside of a literary culture that rewards the armor of irony ... Such Kindness is an astonishing novel about all these feelings, and the actions they call forth when we pay attention.
Not much else happens in the novel, and that is both its strength and its weakness. Dubus, who teaches at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, is known for heavily researching his books, but it doesn’t really show here — and that, I believe, is a good thing ... I kept waiting for Dubus to complicate his characters, to show them existing in many more shades ... Dubus is, undoubtedly, a skilled writer, and Such Kindness is an admirable project for challenging us to show compassion for those on the economic fringes of society. But Tom feels like a prop to articulate Dubus’s worldview, and by the end, I found myself wishing for more levity to cut the woe.
