House of Sand and Fog

HOUSE OF SAND AND FOG (Andre Dubus III) - Four Stars

They don't come much more tragic than this.

From very early on in the novel you know things are not going to end well, and it becomes excruciating reading this novel and waiting for that dark cloud to materialize. The story is effective because the characters are effective, and you care (where it's pure sympathy or merely feeling sorry) for all of them.

Kathy Lazaro (nee Nicolo) is a clinically depressed, recovering alcoholic whose husband left her months ago and who is having increasing difficulty maintaining appearances. She is viewed as a failure and a fuck-up by her family, and the house that she inherited from her deceased father is the only item that can help prove her stability and responsibility to her family. Massoud Behrani is a former Iranian military officer who, after being forced to flee Iran years ago, is having great difficulty maintaining the lifestyle his family is accustomed to. Kathy loses her home due to unpaid business taxes for that location. She does not run a business out of her home—the taxes are a clerical error—and, after dealing with the county and believing the issue to be resolved, she ignores further mailings on the subject and winds up evicted. She is a relatively blameless victim of an American bureaucracy that is fast to act but slow to admit and correct mistakes. Only days after being evicted, the county auctions off the house to pay the back taxes, and the man who buys it is Massoud Behrani. He invests the entirety of his dwindling savings in the purchase of the house, hoping to flip it for a profit so that his family can live comfortably and his son can have a college education.

These two blameless protagonists with all of their eggs in the same basket are thus placed on a collision course with one another. Kathy refuses to let the house go for fear of familial repercussion and because it's all she has left. Behrani refuses to sell back without making a significant profit because his family's livelihood and future is literally at stake. Neither side refuses to yield, and the situation spirals out of control. Lester Burdon, one of the police officers who evicts Kathy, because both sympathetic and infatuated with her and willingly becomes entangled in her battle to regain possession of her house.

It's still easier for me to be sympathetic to the Behranis than Kathy. Their battle is almost one of emotion versus logic: Behrani stands on the logical facts and is not swayed by sentimentality or tears (thinking without feeling); Kathy lets her heart rule her and rarely makes good choices (feeling without thinking). Indeed, the book makes it fairly demanding to remain sympathetic to Kathy and Lester: they continue to make bad decision after bad decision, acting rashly and never stopping for even a moment to THINK about what they are doing and the possible outcomes. But the book also offers good insight into their thought processes, who they are and what makes them tick, and it makes sense and works with the characters' actions. When they both hit bottom it is heartbreaking.

The movie, I think, might even be slightly better than the book. It's very faithful to the story, and moves quicker so the characters stay fresher and remain more sympathetic. Ben Kingsley was so spot-on as Behrani it's impossible for me to even imagine another person in the role. Jennifer Connelly does a very good job as Kathy, and I'm even more impressed with her performance now that I've read the novel and realize how badly she was miscast. Kathy is a frail, small, sympathetically pathetic and almost mousy character, and Jennifer Connelly naturally possesses too much glamour and dignity to be 100% perfect in the role. The ending of the novel is even more brutal than that of the movie.

This is not a light read, but it's a well-told, believable story about well-crafted, if sadly flawed, characters.

Once again Lester had felt nauseated with shame. He went back inside the house, lay on his bed, and for hours imagined an entirely different scene, him taking Pablo's hand, crushing it in his own, then punching Munoz so hard in the face he'd be unconscious for days and wake up in mortal fear of Lester Burdon. Or he imagined himself sidestepping Pablo's arm only to grab it, jerk it behind his back, and break it. And these pictures in his head were not new. He had them for ever boy he ever had to fight at Chula Vista High. Maybe because he was tall and quiet and thin he called more attention to himself than the other anglos at school. But alyways it was the same—"Burdone maricon! Burdone maricon!"—and Lester would try to avoid the fight as long as possible. First he would deny to himself that that was where this name-calling was really going; he would try to smile off whatever insult was coming his way, and only when he felt the push of hands on his chest would he push back, hoping that would be enough, which it never was, and he would hold up fists he had no faith in only to be knocked to the ground, where he would stay curled up waiting for a teacher or someone to break it up or for the bully to lose interest and disappear. But they rarely did. Even when you arrested them, they showed up in your sleep, determined to unmask you, and show you to be the coward you really were.