Under the gray sky we passed one-story houses with small grass lawns. Dubos’s descriptions of the town are so precise: “We rode quietly through Corona (where the titular house is located on Bisgrove St)into San Bruno, where he (Lester) turned north just before the El Camino Real Highway. Behrani, Kathy Nicola and Lester Burdon) indelible, he also makes the suburbs of San Francisco and Kathy’s Pontiac Bonneville also important characters.
But after reading the book, Andre Dubus III makes not only his three main characters (Col. (Feb.I knew going in that “House of Sand and Fog” would be hard-to-put down novel that was vastly depressing since I had seen the 2003 film and still think it’s one of the best movies of this decade. If the tragedy that he so skillfully orchestrates cries out to be leavened with a little less desperation and some quiet glimpse of hope, the keenly perceptive and moving narrative is proof that the son and namesake of one of our most talented writers has embarked on a dazzling career in his own right. Dubus (Bluesman) writes with an authority regarding the American lower middle class that is reminiscent of Russell Banks and Richard Ford, and his limber imagination is capable of drawing the inner lives of three very different main characters with such compassion that readers will find their sympathies hopelessly divided.
The book's horrifying denouement offers readers a searing study in the wages of pride. Tensions between Lazaro and Behrani quickly escalate into violence, as Lazaro's lover, a married police officer with a weak spot for lost causes, decides to take matters into his own hands. But when the house's previous occupant, recovering coke addict Kathy Lazaro, resurfaces with valid claims for repossession, Behrani's plan begins to unravel, and with it his tightly controlled facade of composure. At a county auction, he sinks his savings into a bungalow seized for non-payment of taxes, and quickly moves his family into it, planning to resell the house at a sizable profit. Working on a road crew as a ""garbage soldier"" by day and as a deli clerk by night, Behrani is obsessed with restoring his family to the position of glittering wealth and prestige it once enjoyed. Massoud Amir Behrani, a former colonel in the Iranian Air Force under the Shah, now lives in exile with his wife and teenage son near San Francisco. This powerfully written but bleak narrative is a mesmerizing tale of the American Dream gone terribly awry.
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