Andre Dubus’s stories offer not comfort but truth. Photograph by Marion Ettlinger

Some years ago, in Venice, my wife and I hired a tour guide to shepherd us through the collections at the Galleria dell’Accademia and the Scuola Grande di San Rocco. In the former, he drew our attention to a painting of Mary and the infant Jesus. To my untutored eye, it appeared to be a devout depiction of the Madonna and Child. But we were told that the work was considered blasphemous when it was made, as the pair were not, as tradition demanded, in the exact center of the image. It’s unlikely that I would have seen that on my own. Still, it put me in mind of an old professor of mine, who argued for developing “an original relationship” to the books we studied, by which he seemed to mean that we should come to our own conclusions before entertaining the opinions of professional critics. When you’re told what to look for, he reasoned, you’ll likely find it, and, having found it, you’ll be less likely to notice what you otherwise might have. What we’re talking about here is context, which can either enlighten or blind us. I was grateful for our guide in Venice, but, by the end of the two days we spent in his company, my wife and I began to sense his own blind spots.

I raise this issue because I was in graduate school, trying to become a writer, when I first read Andre Dubus, and my relationship to his stories was largely “original” in the sense that I knew very little about him. I did bring a fair amount of personal context to his work. A lapsed Catholic, I’d been an altar boy for many years and was belatedly discovering that, though I’d successfully flushed most Catholic doctrine from my system, the vocabulary of my former faith—sin, redemption, grace—obstinately remained. I admired the serious way Dubus allowed matters of faith to occupy the center of his fiction, like those Renaissance paintings of the Madonna and Child. Reading him, I even allowed myself to wonder whether my decision to quit the faith had been precipitous, because, in truth, I missed how warm the church of my youth had been in winter, how cool and dry in summer. The smell of incense, the tinkling of the bell at communion, the sense of an entire community humble in the face of mystery—these were the very elements of faith that Luke Ripley extols in Dubus’s “A Father’s Story,” the soothing rituals that nonbelievers throw out with the doctrinal bath water.

I probably also sensed that such rituals were not so different from the ones writers use to summon the literary muse. Most of us have a favorite time of day to work, a favorite chair, a favorite pen—objects and habits that help us enter that mysterious world we can never possess but are possessed by, a state of consciousness that Dubus insisted has less to do with thought than with instinct. When I first read Dubus’s stories, I was struck by their uncompromising honesty. I recognized in his plain, simple diction a debt to Hemingway, whose style I had during my long apprenticeship admired and flirted with, hoping that I might find in such speech an honesty I feared my own stories lacked.

Later, after publishing my own books, I periodically returned to my favorite Dubus stories (“Killings,” “Townies,” “The Pretty Girl,” “A Father’s Story”), finding in them other things to admire, though by then my relationship to his fiction was no longer quite so “original.” Over the years, I’d crossed paths with writers who’d known Dubus well, and who provided additional context. He was, by all accounts, a brilliant, generous teacher. He also had a habit of taking as lovers his more attractive female undergraduate students. I had to squint at this behavior, remind myself that he was of a different generation, and that not so long ago such behavior was common and tolerated, perhaps even admired. What mattered, I told myself, was the stories, and these I still loved. Which was why, when I heard of the terrible highway accident that put Dubus in a wheelchair for the rest of his life, I grieved, and grieved again a decade later, when I heard that he had died.

But, at that point, I had not yet met and become fast friends with his son Andre Dubus III, whose heartbreaking memoir, “Townie,” radically altered my perception of his father’s fiction. The younger Dubus grew up in Newburyport and Haverhill with his mother and his siblings, in grinding poverty. Despite “Townie” ’s terrifying description of that poverty, and of the violence of the author’s adolescence, the memoir also contains a loving portrait of his father, who, at the time, was living just across the river, in Bradford, where he taught creative writing. How was it possible that this father, who saw his children most weekends, could be so blind to the poverty they were living in? How could he look at the boy who bore his name and not see that he lived in a state of terror and deprivation? How could he feel so little for the woman who had borne his children, and now, as a single mother lacking the necessary resources to raise them, had thrown up her hands in defeat?

Unable to square this context with my “original” admiration, I found myself rereading Dubus’s stories with a sinking and ungenerous heart. When the little boy in “The Winter Father” chases his departing dad’s car down the street, crying, “You bum! You bum!,” I saw not a fictional character but my friend. When, in other stories, divorced fathers claimed not to be able to abandon their children, I smelled hypocrisy, and, in the more Catholic stories, where the protagonists use the notion of original sin to excuse selfish behaviors they make no real effort to change, I sniffed it again. My growing disaffection even altered my assessment of the elder Dubus’s style and voice, in particular his debt to Hemingway. When one character suggests to his young girlfriend that they go to Boston, “to Casa Romero and have one hell of a dinner,” I cringed, and cringed again every time one of Dubus’s tough-guy protagonists descended into the sort of macho, romantic self-pity for which Hemingway males are so justly known. Here, I told myself, is a derivative writer who, even in mid-career, is unable to transcend his literary influences. I’d come to see a man I’d once considered a paragon of honesty as fundamentally dishonest.

What does one do with unwanted context? I suspected there was more to my response than an ethical dilemma, and that the more was personal. Not long after reading these stories and judging their author, I went back to work, determined not just to give them a more rigorous reading but also to examine my earlier, visceral reaction to them. Best to begin, I reasoned, with those matters least likely to raise context issues—style, voice, and literary influence. Sure, the debt to Hemingway was undeniable, especially in dialogue. But there were other, less obvious influences, too, like Faulkner, whose style is lush, expansive, and Southern. We think of Dubus as a New England writer—that’s where he spent most of his writing life and where he set the majority of his stories—but he grew up in Louisiana, and the South is ambiently present in his fiction. Dubus’s debt to Faulkner has to do with inclination. It has to do with a willingness, even a need, to burrow deep into the consciousness of characters who, unlike their creator, are too shy or inarticulate or lacking in self-awareness to speak for themselves, and to give such people voice.

Take, for instance, the title character of Anna. In the story’s opening paragraphs, long before we learn that she and her boyfriend, Wayne, will rob a store, Anna Griffin is revealed to us not in terms of what she has but in terms of what she lacks. Anna is a cashier at the Sunnycorner store, and she envies the put-together women who work at the nearby bank and while away their lunch hours thumbing through magazines. After the robbery, she and Wayne go to the mall and buy many of the things they’ve longed for: a color TV, a record player, a vacuum cleaner. The story’s brilliance lies in the fact that finally owning these things doesn’t diminish Anna’s sense of poverty—it deepens it, bringing home to her just how much there is in the world to want. The most heartbreaking detail is the vacuum cleaner, whose cord is longer than it needs to be to clean their tiny apartment. Without being able to articulate it, Anna discovers that their new wealth doesn’t address the root cause of their suffering. When she confesses to a man at a place called Timmy’s that what she’d really like is to tend bar there, his response—“You’d be good at it”—haunts her long after their mall purchases have been unpacked. Her deepest poverty resides in her fear that she’ll never be good at anything, never be worthy of what others assume is their due. It’s a revelation worthy of Chekhov, a writer Dubus often taught and clearly revered.