This is a phenomenal, insightful, sad book. The author tells a compelling story about cultural differences and how our assumptions about others are so often wrong. When I saw the movie version of this book years ago, it blew me away, and I am still haunted by both the story and the images of the film.

However, having seen the movie first actually affected my ability to immerse myself in the book. It took me a very long time to read this. Sometimes knowing the ending doesn't matter, but for some reason it kept me from racing through the book the way I probably would have otherwise. It wasn't the surprise factor, though. It was because the story is so raw and painful, and I knew just how horribly wrong everything was going to turn out, and I couldn't face that pain. While I was reading, I would find myself cringing in fear at the thought of where things were going.

So I guess that gives you an idea of how compelling the story is. Interestingly, the friend who loaned me the book watched the movie AFTER reading the book, and had a very difficult time with the movie. I wonder if it was something similar to what happened to me, shying away from the pain you know is coming. At any rate, you should definitely read the book or see the movie--just maybe not both.

House of Sand and Fog, a National Book Award finalist, is a story of an unresolved issue that entangles the lives of three people, and turns into a crushing conflict with tragic consequences.

An in depth character analysis well worth the read.

4 out of 5 stars.

This is definitely a page turner or, as one of the reviews said, "unputdownable." What makes the conflict between the Kathy, a down-on-her-luck former coke addict scraping by as a house cleaner and Colonel Behrani, a formerly wealthy official in the Shah of Iran's administration is that, bigoted as both may be, they are also both sympathetic characters. Both have formerly been many things and are still reeling from their pasts while trying to carve out a future.

As I began part two, I felt the wind go out of the sails of the narrative, as the viewpoint of Lester, the married cop with whom Kathy has begun an affair, becomes a focus. Simply put, his story is nowhere near as compelling as the conflict between Kathy and Behrani. He does provide a third perspective that moves the narrative along somewhat more objectively, but his introduction is awkward and a bit forced and never really gains much steam, since so many plot elements are already in motion.

I wanted everyone to die.

well, this was not a fun time, she remarked

[*note: I tackled this book as part of my 2023 reading challenge to read books from this crowd-sourced list of recommended standalone novels published between 1985-2007: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/...

Please know that I am a brittle and crotchety reader, so please don't take my opinions on these novels as universal.]

This might be my last attempt at my retro-reading challenge, guys. Mayhap I have already read the books I wanted to read from that time period.

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.

Okay, now that two people who's opinion I typically admire and generally like have told me how much they "loved" this book, I have to fess up...I didn't LOVE it. I thought it was good. I think Dubus is amazing at voice and plot is definitely exciting but about 1/2 way into, my brain started kerplunking over passages and I felt like I was watching a mini-series and I was just anxious for it to be over.

The first kerplunk was when Lester went to the woods to cut fire wood. Hellooooooooo! everyone knows that you can't just cut wood and use it the same day. You've got to let it dry for a season. geesh.

And when Kathy was describing him, "Once we got all the logs in a pile in front of the porch" ("green" logs, I might add) "Lester took off his shirt and started splitting them with the ax........The sweat was dripping off is nose and mustache" ("mustache"-ed policman...gross!)..."and he smiled and thanked me,....leaned over and gave me a short wet kiss....His shoulders and back were gleaming with sweat, and veins were starting to come out in his long arms. sometimes he would let out a littl grunt as he swng the ax down onto the end of the log...."

so here I am reading a perfectly respectable book about class systems, isolation, and loneliness and next thing you know there's sweaty mustaches, grunting and fake fires.

Then, a few pages later Kathy is describing her bathing in the creek, "I pulled off my top and bra, stepped out of my shorts and panties and waded out in the cold water and dived in."

oh brooooooooother! she is so NOT the kind of woman that would refer to her undergarments as "panties". Apparently Dubus realized this as well because he later had her refer to them as underwear. I suppose he's entitled to take a little walk down fantasy lane with the characters he's created, I'm just saying it took a little away from the story for me.

All that being said, I thought the hospital scene was amazing and the Colonels actions made me feel like retching (I mean that as a compliment to the author).

This is a book I would/will/have recommend to people that say they're "not readers". I think it's compelling enough to keep people tied in and, with the few exceptions listed above, written with quality language.

Wow. What a book. I have to admit that his has been on my bookshelves for at least a couple years now. I have taken it down at least a couple times now, each time deterred by the vague premise. Not because it was vague, necessarily, but because what I could glean from it did not appeal to me. Immigrants? Another make it in America story? The Land of Opportunity? Very few out of the many books of this type are worth reading. Like books detailing lives during World War II, most notably concentration camps and Nazis. No offense should be taken when I say that these stories tend to be a dime a dozen. The problem is every writer, proficient or not, finds these to be the easiest topics, the emotional scenes, the psychological torment, already built in to the framework, ready to go. Well, that is where they go wrong. Good writing and a good story is not even about that. A good writer needs to make their own connection to their readers.

Anyhow, this time around, I luckily focused more on the party about "a Shakespearean Tragedy". I thought about it. The typical immigrant story. But. Wait! How did I not notice before that it is most certainly not the typical (as far as fiction goes), seeing as it is a tragedy? A Shakespearean one, miserable? And so I began reading again. The first few chapters I had read before. But this time, knowing this was not simply another outline of some Middle Eastern man working physical wage labor in order to "Live the American Dream", but one that might actually end realistically, I read with much more excitement and vigor.

And that thrill kept itself going for most of the book at a steady pace. Until the last fifty to one hundred pages, in which it was heightened three fold. How was this to end? I knew it was a tragedy, but who was going to die? Who was merely to have an unhappy ending? How Shakespearean was it? Completely would of course mean the death of everyone. A loose interpretation would mean at least a few characters. Who would die? Who would live? Who would merely be heartbroken and miserable? More importantly, how? And why would it all have to end this way? Why are the characters not taking other ways out? Why are they forcing circumstances to reach such an tragically inevitable finish?

A conclusion at the end of this book affirming a belief I have long had in regards to films, television shows, and books alike from this nation: more tragic endings, please. It was such a welcome change to read a story with the exact opposite of the typical happy ending. A Shakespearean tragedy, modernized. Unlike other interpretations, there are no other Shakespearean elements aside from this. No retelling of a Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet. So simple, yet so ingenious. One of those things that causes one to ponder why it has not been done before (so well, to my knowledge). Perhaps this level of tragedy is not needed, but other writers seem unable to resist overshadowing any little tragedy so as to finish with an overall happy ending. And guess what? That is not real life. Quite often, terrible things happen. And that's that. Other countries get this. (Some countries even specialize in tragedies. Here's looking at you, Korea.) When are we to get on board?

As I mentioned and I should be obvious, not only are these types of books sorely needed, but they need to be done right. I am not quite sure of the exacts, as far as the multitude of ways I am sure exist to interpret "right", though I do know that Dubus has one version down pat.

*** Spoilers ***

A short summary. Behrani, a respected Colonel in the Iranian Air Force, has immigrated to the States in order to escape a government equivalent to the SWAT Team. His wife, Nadereh (Nadi), daughter Soroya, and son Esmail, have come with him. Nadi was none too happy about it and still had the occasional crying fights with him about it (unfortunately ending in him sleeping and hitting her a few times). Esmail is an ideal son, respectful, obedient, loving, and trusting. Soroya is a newlywed and no longer lives with them. Much to Behrani's disapproval, she is embarrassed and offended by her family's low standing in their new country; she feels the need to make up for this by frequent stories of their former grace and wealth in Iran.

Behrani currently works physical labor. He had switched places of employment several times, but nothing much changes. Embarrassed, he hides these facts from his own family, dressing in a full suit and tie every morning.

He decides to invest everything his family has in real estate. Behind his wife's back, he purchases a nice bungalow in an auction, shocked by his good luck. He won it at one fourth of its market value. The plan is the resell it immediately to get his family in the black and on their way to real success. When her inevitably tells his wife they must move, then move again after he resells the new place, she is furious. Although she ultimately bows her head and followed his wishes, something integral changes in their relationship. It is not long before they all find out (though Behrani tries to hide this from his family) the reason for his supposed luck. Kathy Nicolo, the former owner of the house, was wrongly accused of not paying back taxes and had her home abruptly seized by the county. By the time they realize their mistake, Behrani has already taken full possession.

Like many men, Behrani feels the responsibility of his family lies entirely on his shoulders. His downfall is his pride, his unwillingness to change things that worked in his home country but may not in his new one, and his stubbornness to do whatever it takes to achieve what he deems his family deserves, even in the face of great risk and logic that says otherwise.

Stubbornly, he refuses to give in and sell the house back to the county, even after finding out that Kathy was indeed wrongly accused, her boyfriend Lester, a police officer, comes to threaten him, Kathy herself comes to the house in tears pleading, that this is all she has left (true to a certain extent; she is a recovering drug and alcohol addict and once this fiasco begins, she relapses), the inheritance from her father, Behrani's wife and son even encourage him to return the house to Kathy.

Kathy is devastated to find Behrani making renovations, seeing the inside completely changed when she visits his wife, the family wining and dining wealthy Iranians on the front lawn, and, most of all, when he almost immediately puts it on the market for sale.

One of the times when he returns home to find Kathy talking to his wife, he violently pushed and tackles her, yelling for her to leave his family alone, though Nederah is meanwhile in tears, calling him names and imploring him to stop, to leave her alone. The last time the two of them meet, he finds Kathy sitting in her car on the driveway, gun in hands, ready to commit suicide.

Still, Behrani feels the house is rightfully his. He was fortunate enough to win the house for one forth its value in the auction and is determined to use the profit to get his family back to a wealthy or at least comfortable place, where he will never again need manual labor. How much is he willing to risk? Kathy has nothing to lose, it seems. But he does. In fact, as it turns out, he has everything to lose.

In the end, Lester holds the three Behrani hostage in their own home, agreeing to let them go only when Behrani signs the house back to Kathy. Obviously, he would be completely naïve to believe this plan would ever work. As soon as Behrani does what he is being demanded to, he can immediately turn around, press charges, and get the house back. Not to mention ruining Kathy and Lester's lives forever. Now that he had nothing to lose, Lester pushes forward. Alas, once he is in the hostage situation, his two choices are to push forward and hope that Behrani does not press charges, or simply give up.

In the final showdown, Nederah back at the house, he takes Esmail and Colonel Behrani to the courthouse and walks them in. In a moment of distraction, Esmail manages to grab his gun and turn it on him. Nearby screams, police officers in the vicinity turn their guns on him, demanding him to drop his weapon. He looks to his father for guidance, and in a look that he will regret until he dies, he tells his son to not let go of it. Second later, Esmail is shot. Lethally. And the regret "until he dies" becomes a mere few hours. He returns to his house, murders Kathy, suffocates his sleeping wife. Then, donning his Colonel's uniform, turns the gun on himself, laying down next to his wife.

Meanwhile, in his shock and guilt, Lester confesses everything. He is incarcerated along with Kathy.

A refreshing, tragic, most Shakespearean ending, no? Well, I loved it.

Good writing. A miserable, depressing story though.

Andre Dubus III's second novel, House of Sand and Fog was adapted to film in 2003 by a Ukrainian-Americana director by the name of Vadim Perelman. Luckily, Perelman enlisted the help of Roger Deakins A.S.C., who's really just a wizard behind the camera. Also, Deakins is the man partially responsible for why most of the films by the Coen's look so inimical and striking in that trademark, neo-noir way that they do. He's also quite talented at dancing around landscapes and interiors with his camera in such a way that the characters seem almost like magical wraiths. Kingsley's tactfully understated performance helps a bit, but between an all-too liberal use of fog machines, and an oppressively swelling musical score the film is forced along as a excessive exhibition of charged melodrama, and clichés about the American Dream. Then again, Perelman's adaptation is a fairly literal reenactment of the story.

Details seem fairly important to this particular tale because Dubus III is more or less prodding the reader to come to some sort of moral conclusion. Again, they seem important to the story, but they aren't always terribly consistent. To begin with, there is Kathy Nicolo. What we know about her barely takes up a page; her husband recently left her, they were recovering drug addicts. She's now living in the coastal town of Corona, in a house that was left to her by her father, and she cleans other people's houses in order to make ends-meet. That's about the bulk of the information that the reader is given at the onset. The conflict that begins the story is that the county is auctioning off her house due to delinquent business tax payments because, you know, she's a recovering addict; they never open their mail, right? She's hastily evacuated from her house one foggy morning, and begins to take last-second, desperate legal actions.

Meanwhile, Colonel Mahsoud Behrani, a former SAVAK (Sāzemān-e Ettela'āt va Amniyat-e Keshvar) - basically the Shah's secret police, a nasty little organization, even by secret organization standards - member who fled to the United States when the Iranian Monarchy was overthrown by Ayatollah Khomeini during the Iranian Revolution in the late 70's. Mr. Behrani has been working on a road crew in the Bay Area, as well as at a convenience store at night. He does this in order to keep up the illusion and appearance that his family is still living as luxuriously as they did in their homeland. Noticing an ad in the paper for an ocean-side bungalow that is being auctioned off at a ridiculously low price, Behrani sees his standard-American-Dream-type opportunity to quit working and manipulate the real-estate market by buying auctioned off homes and selling them at four-times what he originally paid. And really, there's nothing wrong with that ... or is there? Anyway, he buys it, and quickly begins remodeling it, with the intention of moving in autumn. It's summer, correct?

So, Ms. Nicolo might be a pathetic recovering drug-addict, but it turns out that there is no reason that she should have paid a business tax in the first place, or rather, the county goofed on the exact address; the details in the book get a little hazy. There is another passage that confusingly describes it as a mere $500 property tax. Regardless, the county had no right to auction off her house, so her lawyer threatens to sue. The county tries to rescind the sale, but it's too late, and Behrani is not budging. He perceives this as a blunder on the part of foolish American bureaucracy, and feels that Ms. Nicolo must take it up with the county. Aware of the fact that he can quadruple his profit by selling it himself, he only agrees to sell it back to her for that amount. Kathy can sue the state, but that will take months, she's living out of her car, and well, she believes that it's still her house.

Taking pity on this hapless female, knight-in-shining-armor Deputy Lester Burdon, the officer that came to Kathy's door on that fateful foggy day, has taken a liking to her, despite the fact that he's a father of two and still married. Apparently, he's been waiting for this opportunity for a long time, and this downtrodden, homeless, recovering drug-addict* is exactly the woman he needed to help him realize how much of a domestic zombie he had been all this time. This is where things begin to get really goofy. Kathy has already been making too many visits to the house. Behrani becomes aware of this, turns her away, and obstinately refuses to believe that he should give up the home for what he originally paid. After years of service Burdon suddenly becomes a loose cannon for Ms. Nicolo's sake; one particular visit illustrates his racism (well, you could call it racism, it's hardly that convincing in the book), and the worst possible results occur.

Dubus III takes some liberties with what is an otherwise straightforward narrative; nothing too liberal really. He begins by switching back and forth between the first-person perspectives of Colonel Behrani and Kathy Nicolo. It's clearly an attempt to offer a balanced account of the moral conflict of the story. After part two, he switches to third-person narration, and intermittently returns to Burdon, Behrani, and Nicolo as the tension builds. The prose style is mostly straightforward American realism, nothing too minimal, but nothing terribly nuanced either. Voicing for Behrani, he's probably most at his most compelling as a stylist, but he has a terrible habit of running headlong into mundane details, mostly irrelevant to the story. Many of the log cabin scenes read like lackadaisical journal entries. As he must have felt somewhat awkward, telling part of the story from an Iranian-American point-of-view, he plays it safe, tossing in the occasional stylistic riff, seemingly a result of a sufficient amount of research. The important thing here is that Dubus III does manage to avoid a bias of any specific character's perspective, thus strengthening the conversational aspect of his moral storytelling capabilities.

So then, in the end, is Dubus III suggesting that this is a small story of the complications inherent in pursuing the American Dream? He seems to suggest that it can be profitable for some, and not so much for others; the one's that don't profit. There is also a familiar thematic quality found in the characters of Nicolo and Burdon (who are more or less suggested to be the "bad" guys here) that was noticeable in his first book The Cage Keeper and Other Stories, people who could only be described as the relatively well-intentioned in society who sometimes end up falling through the cracks. Usually these people are ex-cons or addicts who realize what they've done wrong, yet who are also seemingly predisposed toward screwing up their lives, no matter how much they enact change, even for brief periods of time. Actually, Dubus III's humanitarian preoccupations seem reminiscent of Hubert Selby Jr. and Flannery O'Connor, in that he shares a similar preoccupation with the obstinacy of human depravity. In the case of certain characters of his, they can't help but continuously fail, and he wants to see them do so; it doesn't seem to hurt that they also manage to bring level-headed or impressionable people down with them.

Culturally speaking, this is a dodgy book. Dubus III had very specific reasons for choosing an ex-SAVAK member as one of his main characters. To add a weak-willed white female character such as Kathy to the story seems to indicate that he is beckoning the reader to make a seriously difficult judgment call concerning who the villain really is here; whether Ms. Nicolo is simply a weak woman, prone to blaming other people for her own irresponsibility, or whether it's that Behrani is a greedy misogynist; a human relic of an inhumane empire that was trumped by the Iranian peoples' refusal to live in constant fear. It could be that while Kathy doesn't do anything wrong or immoral at the beginning of the story, her proclivity for irresponsible life choices, eventually turns a small mess, into an enormous one. Either that, or substance abuse is to blame, but Dubus III doesn't seem to dwell on that specific issue intensely enough. And there is also the issue of Bahrani’s values, which could hardly be described as sympathetic to women; this is apparent in his various descriptions of Kathy throughout the book; the epithet "mother whore" is used quite a bit. He's also been know to physically assault his own wife. Actually, Lester Burdon's character doesn't display much more sympathy for women or human life at all really. But it would hardly be accurate to say that misogyny is the true villain here. And in a very Selbyesque fashion, these three characters become so obsessed with their respective pursuits of happiness, that their purported selflessness is really something of a lie in the end. It's just difficult to tell who Dubus III is siding with, or who's in the right. Not that all novels should have such a morally tight conclusion, but toward the end, the reader can't help but wonder if he is even aware of ever having a specific moral point to begin with.

*Although, a nymphlike Jennifer Connely plays Kathy in the Perelman film, which makes it a little more convincing.

I think my major problem with this book was that I did not care a lick about the characters. I think the author just simply presented stereotypes - a big turn off for me. You know, the angry Middle Eastern dude with a temper problem and blinding pride; the female white-trash junkie who loves playing the victim, wants to improve her life, but darn it, she just can't, and who falls in love with her knight in shining armor; and the cop who deep, deep down is a good guy, but who falls prey to the power and control that comes with the badge, although his abuse of power is really for the greater good. Sigh....

Normally, I would not even continue with a book I am so disinterested in, but it had gotten such buzz, there had to be something redeeming or particularly exciting that was forthcoming in the novel, right? Eh, not so much.

I will say the best part of the book is its ending, (not just because the book was over), but because the most suspenseful part of the plot occurs at the end - but it was too little too late based upon characters I didn't actually like or believe. Of course, it is all tragic - the Middle Eastern dude kills his wife and himself after his son dies as a result of the power abusing cop - the white trash junkie pines for her cop-turned-criminal boyfriend and refuses to mitigate her role in the crime - and the cop-turned-criminal boyfriend has plenty of time to ponder his life choices and his love for the junkie (while he's still married and has two kids, by the way).

Ho-hum. Onto better books!

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.