Don't Mess With the Locals: Whether You are on the Merrimack or off the Harbor

Townie, a memoir by the best-selling author Andre Dubus III, is the small-town Caucasian version of season four of The Wire. It ends better for him than it does for most of the school kids in Baltimore (perhaps because he is white and his family, though poor, has better connections) but it still explores the same theme: the realm of male violence.

Dubus grows up in a sequence of rough and tumble mill towns in Massachusetts. His home life is anarchy. His dad is mainly absent, teaching college, banging college girls, and becoming a heralded short story writer. His mom is harried and overworked. The kids are left to fend for themselves. He is bullied, beaten, intimidated, and traumatized. The same goes for his artistic younger brother. Then he learns to fight. He also learns to box (there's definitely that vibe from Cutty's gym in The Wire . . . tough street kids learning some discipline and skills that actually translate to their day-to-day existence).

Dubus eventually finds his way, but it's a long and meandering path, fraught with bar-room brawls, vindication, weight-lifting, boxing, stalking people in the streets looking for justice, and the constant looming threat of violence. Once Dubus learns to break that "membrane" and punch someone in the face, over and over, hurt them, it's hard to unlearn that power.

The book might be a bit long, but I blew through it in a few days. I think it's required reading for anyone who has been in a fight, chickened out of a fight, or wonders why some guys end up throwing punches (or worse) for little reason at all. This might help explain those feelings.

Dubus is constantly trying not to portray himself as a hero-- he understands that throwing down isn't the solution if you want to move forward-- but in so many instances, the person willing to use violence is the hero of the moment . . . just perhaps not in retrospect.

The book ends how it must, and those sections when Dubus matures and reconnects with his dad drag a bit, but the first 2/3 of the book is some of the most compelling reading on what it's like to be a young man who needs to establish himself in a fluid and dangerous environment that I have ever read (and again, you should read this in conjunction with Season 4 of The Wire to see both sides of the coin: the white-trash version and the inner city black version).