“And that's what I wanted: obliteration. Decimation. Just an instant smear of me right out of all this rising and falling and nothing changing that feels like living.” In the beginning there was Kathy Nicolo. She is an addict who has been through a drug rehabilitation program. She has been flying straight for a while. She cleans houses for a modest living. She spends most of her free time watching movies, one after the other. All is going okay until she has a dispute with the county over the house her father left her and her brother. They claim she owes back taxes. She goes down to the county offices and gets it “sorted out”, but she continues to get letters from the county office which she promptly throws away without opening. Anybody who has ever dealt with any level of bureaucracy knows that issues are not always “sorted out” the first time. The problem is that Kathy doesn’t have much experience dealing with anything. She avoids, evades, and hits the escape hatch any time anything gets too real. The next thing she knows the cops are on her doorstep explaining to her that she has an order to vacate. Her property has been seized. She meets Deputy Sheriff Lester Burdon as he is escorting her off her property. She can tell by the way he is looking at her that he is attracted to her. She is pretty, waifish, and vulnerable. He has a wife and two kids, but every time he makes love with his wife it feels like he is making out with his sister. They are best friends, comfortable with each other, and like a lot of people he interprets that to mean the spark is gone from the marriage. Kathy, as he soon finds out, is much more than a spark. She is more like a full on raging forest fire. The county sells her property quickly. This is where Colonel Massoud Behrani enters the plot. He and his family were lucky to escape Iran when the Shah is ousted. He was high enough up in the government to see his name appear on the blacklists. His wife has never really forgiven him for the circumstances that have made them immigrants in America. They did escape with some money, but much of that has been eaten up by keeping up appearances with the community of Persians in California. Behrani works two crappy jobs, one picking up trash along the highways and the other as a late night convenience clerk. Both jobs that are difficult to hire Americans to do at any price. “For our excess we lost everything.”It is no wonder to me that immigrants excel in the United States. They take chances. They work hard. They don’t expect anything for nothing. Behrani is no exception and when Kathy’s house comes up for auction he takes the last of their savings and buys the house. As it turns out he is also lucky that only two other bidders show up and he buys the house for a fraction of the value. Now I say lucky, but I always feel we make our own luck. Luck never just happens, you have to give luck a chance to reward you. In his mind he can already see the real estate empire that this first house will help finance. Kathy and Lester hit it off. ”I felt a little better as I pulled the T-shirt over my head and caught the faint scent of vomit and gun oil. Me and Lester.” They are screwing like bunnies and when they are together everything is fine, but when they are apart it becomes readily apparent that their relationship is built out of sand. He starts thinking about how easily she fell into bed with him. She starts thinking he is going to go back to his wife and kids. Kathy really hates the idea of Colonel Behrani and his family in HER house. The county admits it made a mistake, but the sales transaction with Behrani is legal. He would have to agree to sell the house back to the county for what he paid for it. His visions of a hefty profit float up into the fog. Kathy isn’t adhering to the program. ”And I knew to any of my counselors back East my life wouldn’t look very manageable; I was drinking again, and smoking; I was sleeping with a man who’d just left his family, all while I was supposed to be getting back the house I’d somehow lost. I knew they would call the drinking a slip, the smoking a crutch, the love making ‘sex as medication,’ and the house fiasco a disaster my lack of recovery had invited upon itself, and on me.” Embracing those addictions is making her unstable world spin faster while her mind spins slower. It is an unusual situation with all parties being victims of an unresolvable issue with the county. Given what we know about Behrani he isn’t who Kathy thinks he is. Kathy isn’t really who he thinks she is either. As the plot advances we also find out that Lester isn’t who anyone thinks he is either. Of course, Kathy is like nitroglycerin in his head. It always amazes me how one little mistake can lead to such complete chaos. Andre Dubus III keeps adding snakes to the plot until it is all so twisted together that only the sword of Alexander the Great will untie it. Dubus reveals all the characters, even the second tier characters, with such depth that I felt like I know these people. My mind even now is still weighing all the ramifications from everyone’s decisions as if this is an ongoing crisis that is still yet to be resolved. Andre Dubus has done his homework on this very American novel.I enjoyed the real estate aspects of the plot. I also liked the way that Dubus has us ride along with each character giving us free access to their inner thoughts, their hopes, and desires. He also shows how many chances people get to turn their life around. The many hands that are outstretched to keep them from falling too far. Sometimes it just doesn’t matter how much help someone receives they continue to make the same bad decisions until tragedy overtakes them sometimes with equally tragic results for others. They made a movie out of this book in 2003. I’ve not seen the film. I, as usual, skipped the film until I had a chance to read the book. From what I’ve read about the movie they significantly changed the ending, leaving some very important and pivotal scenes in the book out of the plot of the movie. I’m not discouraged because I know that films are a different entity from the book that inspired them. I will report back after watching the movie.
As a renter with cable television, I had a relatively safe perch from which to view the housing boom and bust in America. From the safety of my beloved armchair, covered in crumbs and clad in sweatpants, I could flip the channels and watch any number of reality shows about ordinary Americans flipping houses. The game was simple. You bought a cheap house, with the abundant available credit, fixed it up, and turned around and sold it. Do it right, and you could pocket a year's worth of salary in six weeks. Do you rememer those days? Back when America's pasttime transitioned from baseball to selling houses to one another? I do. I remember it well because I always thought I was missing out on something, just like I'd missed out on the Internet boom/bust and, earlier in my life, the slap-bracelet boom/bust and the Zubaz boom/bust (I'm still waiting for Zubaz to come back around). Of course, I didn't do anything to get in the game. I wouldn't say I was too lazy, it's just that I didn't want to do anything that required me to leave my chair. Eventually, the housing market collapsed. And with it went all those reality shows about flipping houses. Why do I mention this? Well, even though House of Sand and Fog preceded the start of the housing boom, it's essentially the story of a house-flip gone horribly wrong. It pits Kathy Nicolo, a recently-divorced former substance abuser, against Massoud Behrani, a former Iranian colonel (he's still Iranian, but no longer a colonel) who now balances two unskilled jobs, in a life-and-death struggle for a California bungalow with an ocean view. The story starts wtih Kathy getting wrongfully evicted from her house for failure to pay the county taxes. She is evicted by Deputy Lester Burden, with whom she is soon engaged in a lukewarm affair. Massoud, who has been exiled from his native land, where he was wealthy and powerful, scrapes together the money to buy Kathy's home at auction. His plan is to fix it up, install a widow's walk, and sell it for a big profit. He is motivated to do this in order to recapture the lost wealth and prestige suffered by his family upon coming to America. That's the set up. Like any good thriller, the stakes and tension rise with each page, until the inevitable collision. To say the least, Andre Dubus' novel holds your attention, and forces you to keep reading, even though you can probably guess that things won't end amicably. House of Sand and Fog is a genre novel - a contrived culture clash - burnished by Dubus' literary pedigree. The book is structured so as to provide opposing first-person viewpoints: that of Massoud and Kathy. There are also sections told in third-person that focus on Deputy Burden. The two first-person narrators works quite effectively. It gives you deep insight into the main characters, but also avoids the Dickens Effect, a term I've coined to describe first-person narrators that are never very interesting, since they're always only looking out their own eyes. Dubus' framework allows us to be both outside-looking-in and inside-looking-out. Dubus' strives to find a consistent voice for both Kathy and Massoud. Kathy is the least interesting character in the book. It's hard to see her as anything other than a white-trash whiner. Dubus has far more success with Massoud. Clearly, he did his homework on Persian culture, and crafts a fully-realized man with a rich and complex history. Earlier there was fog, but now the sky is the color of peaches and the sun is low over the ocean I cannot yet see from our home. The najars have for two hours been gone. Before leaving, they cleaned up the area well, covering the new lumber with a large green canvas they weighted with old wood from the roof. I sit upon the front step and view my son using the rake to gather the cut grass in the yard. He wears what is called a tank shirt, and short pants which are quite loose, and I see the long muscles beginning to show in his arms and legs, his shoulders as well...House of Sand and Fog is fine for what it is: a quick, detail-oriented, better-written-than-normal thriller (and by "thriller", I mean a story that, by its nature, ends ludicrously). Yet from its title, to the cover, to its repeated mentions of fog, you are knocked over the head with the novel's literary pretensions. Indeed, it was a National Book Award finalist. My praise certainly does not go that high. A book like this suffers from the snowball effect. You know, when a snowball starts rolling down a mountain, until it becomes a big snow-boulder (like the kind you see in cartoons that run down an anthropomorphic animal on skies.) At the beginning, in the snowball stage, things are fine and dandy; that is, the drama is tight, believable, relatable. As the snow ball picks up more snow, and gets bigger, the story gets a little shaggy. By the end - the snow boulder stage - when characters are getting into unbelievable situations, and things get a little pulpy, well, that's where I lose interest. Still, it's a good deal of fun getting to that weak ending. This is a book you'd usually feel guilty about reading - especially because it's been another summer and you still haven't finished War and Peace - but you don't feel guilty because it has a leit motif and its written by a guy named Andre.
What do You think about House Of Sand And Fog (2011)?
I am a little surprised reading all of the reviews by other people of this book. No one supports Kathy in this endeavor. Everyone has mainly sympathy for Behrani and his moral stance and I must admit, i find that a bit shocking. Let me get this straight, I don't particularly like Kathy, or Behrani, or Les for that matter and I do understand each of their viewpoints. However, I'm shocked that people would consider a bureaucratic error fair reason for losing your home. People keep referring to her as the former owner, but truthfully, the house was always her. She and her brother owned it and the county sold something that was never there's by mistake. Would anyone feel okay if a home that was legally bought and paid for, was sold out from under them and then evicted from their own property? Would anyone just say, oh darn, county did it again. Guess I should just move on? Really? She didn't owe the property taxes that were the reason behind her eviction. Yeah, she was lazy and should have opened her mail to see what they were saying but moderate negligence shouldn't mean that a mistake couldn't be rectified. Moving on, each of the characters seemed awful to me. Weak-willed and aimless Kathy, recovering drug addict, always avoiding responsibility and just letting others guide her actions. Les, the adulterer, plants evidence, and bullies those around him due to his feelings of impotence. Colonel Behrani, militant and domineering but trying to support his family after fleeing his homeland and losing the affluence and influence from which he is accustomed. They are all wonderfully drawn, detailed and nuanced, incredibly human and intrinsically awful. Behrani for all his high values, hates the country that shelters him, beats his wife when she disagrees and continuously deceives everyone he cares about. Kathy, never develops at all, just spirals downward to a life where she doesn't have to try, just be mute and go along. Les, well, he just seems to be a little boy pretending to be a man. It's hard to want to empathize with people you would never want to meet.The pacing started out strong for me, but about halfway through, I got tired of the slow buildup, this agonizing crawl to a collision. The tension that had been created became exhausting and I wish the author had started to capitalize sooner on it. But the time the climax had finally arrived I just wanted it to end. It was like an awful accident you couldn't turn your gaze from, hoping at each point that someone would give way and end the inevitable calamity.So, while I feel that it was well written in many ways, I can't say I particularly liked the book or even enjoyed it. But, I must say, I do want to discuss it!
—Casilde
I'll spare reviewing the entire plot, since I see many posters have done a fine job already. My thought through this book was that Kathy was responsible for most of the problems in this story. She was the one who ignored the tax notices (having answered them would have fixed the clerical error), she was the one who went to the Iranians home after being told not to by her lawyer, and she didn't stand up to her boyfriend when the situation went completely out of control.Granted, her entire life was sad and filled with poor choices....the most of which was ignoring her tax notices.The end was sad and left me depressed, but I thought about it for a few more days. Mostly I just got cranky with Kathy's poor choices and how they rippled out to others.
—Tracey
What was the point? That's how I felt at the end. Only reason I gave it two stars and not one is that it did hold my interest, surprisingly. I agree with one poster who said Kathy Nicolo was very annoying, weak and pathetic. First of all, you're a dumbass for not opening your tax notices. Secondly, you've got the opportunity here to sue the pants off the county. Why the heck would you tell your lawyer to forget about it???? Third, your boyfriend shows up at the house wielding a gun...why don't you say something? Anything? She just goes along with it. Also, I didn't like the writing much. The author kept putting in details just for the sake of putting in details, and if I had to read one more time about what the characters' breath smelled like I thought I was going to scream. Perhaps I could understand Kathy not wanting to pursue getting the money from the lawsuit if the author had injected the slightest bit of emotional attachment to the house. But there was none. And what had she done in the past to make her think her family was so down on her anyway? We needed to get to know this woman a little more in order to have sympathy for her.
—Leanna Henderson
