Susan Oleksiw

February 20, 2025
 
As I look at this date, and then the date on the previous post, I'm appalled that I have been silent in this space for almost a year. It hardly seems possible, but it is. My niece occasionally asks me if I've been posting regularly on Thursdays as I said I intended. Fortunately, our conversation moves on quickly and more than shaking my head in chagrin, nothing more is said.
 
A lot has happened in the last year. As you might imagine, a lot changes for someone when their life partner of 55 years dies. My experience hasn't been so different from other women losing a partner. I passed through the stage of seeing something interesting and thinking, I should tell Michael about that. He'd loved hearing that. Then came, I wish I could tell Michael about that. And after that, the less interesting, Oh, look at that. My response to minor catastrophes was about the same. I'm now at the stage of wondering where I left that very useful screw driver, or maybe it's time to check that pipe that runs so close to the outside wall—it has been pretty cold lately. And out of six hammers, one is just right for my hand.
 
I suppose the major change is what happens when there's more time of a different sort. There's less focus because there's no time crunch; the mind wanders and bumps into unexpected thoughts. I'm at the stage of thinking I meant to try that, to spend more time there. I have more time and I have less time. The result is less fiction and more photography—and yet it's all narrative.
 
This is an ongoing transit. I use the word transit because transition seems to imply an end point, and I'm not convinced there is one. Instead, I seem to be on a spiraling upward or sideways or somewhere, changing and discovering and trying things out. There will be more to report, but this is enough for now.
 
 
 
 

Few books are worth a rating of 5 in my view, but this one rates a 10, if there were such a ranking. This is a brilliant immersion into the world of three people shuffled around unkindly by life, still struggling to find meaning and a path forward.

Alice is a young mother who takes a job as a stripper in a men's club to support her daughter and save enough for a house. She has pride, dignity, and a fierce determination. A.J. is separated from his wife by a judge who could not see, in A.J.'s view, how much he loved his wife and son. A frequent visitor to the club, he is dissolving into alcohol and debt and obsession. Bassam is a young man from the Middle East both drawn to and repelled by the licentiousness of the club and the people of America. You other characters get their own sections. Jean, a widow who lives below Alice and rents her the apartment, has little of interest in her life except for Alice's three-year-old girl. Lonnie is a bouncer at the club, a man who doesn't belong there by temperament but doesn't know where he else he can go. Deena, A.J.'s wife, struggled with the legal right to go to court against her husband, and her ambivalence of love for the man who saw something special in her, built them a house, and is devoted to their son. Virginia, A.J.'s mother, isn't blind to her son, but her love moves beyond that, to see the entire man he is.

The lives of Alice, Lonnie, and A.J. collide at the Puma Club for men when Alice brings her daughter to the club when Jean is unexpectedly hospitalized. The author spends a lot of time on the life for women who work in such clubs, what is expected, even required, of them, and what is demanded if they take a misstep and find themselves in debt to the owner. The ugly world is presented almost journalistically, with the coolness of a reporter, but the interior lives are vivid. The author has clearly done the research to understand the thinking of a young Muslim finding himself seduced by all that he considers evil, the work of Satan. There are moments of artistic beauty, as is to be expected from Dubus, but nothing impeded the story, which propelled this reader page after page.

There is no one day or moment when the story ends, as a reader expects. Instead we see the consequences of each character's decisions, choices, and opportunities reaching into the years beyond the month of crisis precipitated by meeting at the Puma Club. Each life's future is pitch perfect for that character, wholly satisfying and without sentimentality.

This book has numerous rewards for the careful reader—the details in each character's life, the different and diverse ways of thinking, the passage of time from scene to scene, day to day, the Florida landscape along the Gulf, the discovery of what's possible below the surface.