By Matt Hanson

Don’t underestimate the elemental power of a story that takes the reader inside the mind and heart of a good and decent man caught in a helpless situation.

Such Kindness by Andre Dubus III. W.W.Norton, 336 pages.

Tom Lowe, the protagonist of Andre Dubus III’s novel Such Kindness, isn’t doing well. Formerly happily married with children, he made a good living as a carpenter, proudly supporting himself with his own two hands. A hard worker by trade and inclination, Tom knows his way around a worksite (even if he perhaps works too much). At times, he enjoyed the private satisfaction of having personally built his family home. When we meet him, that idyllic suburban life in the suburbs is too far gone to be attainable.

Everything went to hell when he accidentally fell off a roof one day and became hooked on “o’s” (obviously a reference to the oxycontin epidemic) that helped to kill or at least dull his constant pain. The fallout: the adjustable-rate mortgage he was naively hustled into suddenly fell apart, he lost his family to addiction, and now he’s disgruntledly living alone in “the 8,” otherwise known as public housing. All he’s got is a makeshift couch, a coffee table supported by the yellowing books he once read for the college degree he never finished, and the constant stab of pain of the screws in his hips whenever he stands up for too long. And his car’s in hock, to boot.

Lowe is understandably wounded about his literal and metaphorical fall from grace but, wisely, the novel doesn’t transform him into a psycho or a degenerate or a fascist. Abject as Lowe is, he refuses to let resentment about the people who led more comfortable, materially abundant lives (whom he somewhat crankily dubs “abundists”) define him. Part of what makes Such Kindness successful is that, even though we are given a vision of a dismal life, we also see that there is dignity within Tom’s unbroken soul.

Lowe’s predicament reminds me of the adage that you can’t keep a good man down. So long as he is satisfied that what is inside of him will somehow keep him afloat. The problem is how to hold on to that goodness when it’s tested by what the world will throw at you.

Lowe has a genuine and affectionate friendship with Trina, the twentysomething mother of two living across the hall. She wears a hoodie and pajama pants in all kinds of weather. She has been dealt a series of very bad hands in life and knows perfectly well the mess that she’s in. She grew up in a pervy family, beset by drugs and little opportunity. Now her young children do nothing but play violent video games all day. She’s stalked by a psychotic ex and has a current boyfriend who is starting to become involved in fraud. He’s not particularly concerned about the potential consequences. Eventually this includes the reluctant Tom, who insists that, by refusing ill-gotten gains, he will keep his sense of honor intact.

Tom is reasonable enough to know that his wretched status in life doesn’t define him. Emotionally, however, it’s another story. It’s extremely hard to see a way out of his rut. At one point he becomes heartbreakingly excited at the idea of selling his beloved tools for relatively meager Craigslist money. He’s kept them in flawless condition, even if he doesn’t use them. Tom longs to go through the motions of being a normal dad again, if only for a little while, to take his estranged son out to dinner. He needs to demonstrate that his old man isn’t such a loser after all. It doesn’t quite work out that way, given the company Tom’s forced to keep.

The novel’s minor characters, especially Tom’s other sketchy neighbor who may or may not have screwed him over, are vividly drawn. Dubus has a finely tuned sense of what marginal people are like, how they talk, what kind of cigarettes they smoke, what their expectations are. I have been around struggling people enough to recognize it when I see it. It would be too easy and too simple to say quaint things about how “their humanity shines through” or whatever so I’ll put it like this — just remember that you would act differently if you also had to scrounge for your next meal.

Tom’s ragged pilgrimage to where his son goes to school in western Mass. turns out to be desperately impractical, landing him in situations he really has no business being in. Tom’s almost quixotic struggle to keep his meager life together builds in suspense; the plot’s tension is very well paced, intensifying little by little. I tried to renew my copy at the library when I was about halfway through, only to find that someone else had it on reserve. I decided that I just couldn’t handle waiting to see how Tom’s desperate attempt at fatherly reconciliation would end up, so I ended up rushing out to buy a new one.

There are plenty of novels describing these kinds of hardships. They called it “dirty realism” during the Reagan era, but nowadays it sure seems like it’s just plain realism. It is easy for otherwise blameless people to slip into America’s social, mental, and emotional quicksands. Dubus touches on the structural reasons for why that is. Shady financial dealings at Tom’s bank are partly what has screwed up his life, and he is aware of how disturbingly widespread that experience can be.

All that said, Such Kindness has some structural weaknesses. The plotting can be a little wobbly, the title is clunky, selected scenes don’t really resolve all that well. On top of that, the epiphany Tom has towards the end, which “magically” ameliorates his forlorn attitude, falls short of the called-for narrative and emotional weight.

But these defects give way to the fact that poor Tom’s plight moved me in a way that I have rarely felt in contemporary fiction. Cutting irony and whimsical imagination and linguistic acrobatics all have their place, but don’t underestimate the elemental power of a story that takes the reader inside the mind and heart of a good and decent man caught in a helpless situation. It’s valuable to see how Tom gradually comes to terms with how his life went irrevocably askew for reasons that were both under his control and not, which is the anxious balance of how life is really lived.

These days, there are a disturbing number of very real people whose vital statistics match Tom’s. People who were similarly screwed over, who aren’t as noble as Tom tries to be, and who never receive the brief moments of grace Tom’s sympathetic creator grants him. Such Kindness resonates with considerable force in our absurdly abundant country, one that, nevertheless, always seems to be teetering on the edge, partially because of how it treats the members of the underclass. Tom Lowe is everywhere; look around you.

Matt Hanson is a contributing editor at the Arts Fuse whose work has also appeared in the American Interest, the Baffler, the Guardian, the Millions, the New Yorker, the Smart Set, and elsewhere. A longtime resident of Boston, he now lives in New Orleans.