The Garden of Last Days
by Andre Dubus III

List Price: $24.95
Pages: 554
Format: Hardcover
ISBN: 9780393041651
Publisher: W.W. Norton & Co.

Andre Dubus III is the author of a collection of short fiction, The Cage Keeper and Other Stories, and the novels Bluesman, House of Sand and Fog, and The Garden of Last Days (W. W. Norton, 2008). His work has been included in The Best American Essays of 1994, The Best Spiritual Writing of 1999 and The Best of Hope Magazine. He has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, the National Magazine Award for fiction, and the Pushcart Prize, and he was a finalist for the Rome Prize Fellowship from the Academy of Arts and Letters. An Academy Award–nominated motion picture and published in seventeen languages, House of Sand and Fog was a fiction finalist for the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and was a Booksense Book of the Year, Oprah Book Club selection, and #1 New York Times bestseller.

To support his writing, Dubus has worked a number of odd jobs, mainly night work that allowed him mornings in which to write: bartender, assistant private investigator and bounty hunter, halfway house counselor for convicted adult felons, group counselor for depressed teens, house cleaner, and carpenter. A member of PEN American Center, Dubus has served as a panelist for the National Book Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts and has taught writing at Harvard University, Tufts University, and Emerson College. He is currently a full-time faculty member at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. He is married to the performer Fontaine Dollas Dubus. They live in Massachusetts with their three children.

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Andre Dubus III on Fact and Fiction in The Garden of Last Days


Like many other writers, I prefer not to talk too much about how a story came to be. On one level, after months or years of dreaming a novel, it is difficult to find the logic behind it, if such a thing exists. Creative writing is so often rooted in deep intuitive impulses, and to look back and talk about them rationally feels to me unhelpful and even vaguely dishonest. But in The Garden of Last Days one of the main characters is a composite of the real 9/11 hijackers who did real harm to real people. It is only fair, therefore, that the reader have some idea of what is factual in this novel and what is fiction.

In the weeks after that brutal September morning, we began to learn something of the hijackers. We learned that many of them had trained in Florida, that they’d been seen visiting strip clubs. This was confusing. How could these young men be self-described holy warriors but also frequent strip clubs? What lingered for me even more than this was the image of cash on a bedroom bureau in Florida, money earned by a woman who’d danced for one or more of them.

I set out to write what I thought then would be a short story based on one of these women. But, as is so often the case with the writing of fiction, the story began to change from where I assumed it may go; other characters came in, other lives. Soon enough, it became clear to me that I was writing not a short story but a novel, one that wanted to be told from many points of view. One of these was Bassam al-Jizani’s.

For months and months, I tried not to write from his point of view. My resistance was twofold: (1) In my novel House of Sand and Fog, I had already written from a Middle Eastern man’s perspective, and while these characters are very different people --- Colonel Behrani from that book is a secular Shi’ite Iranian military man of late middle age, while Bassam is a young Sunni extremist from Saudi Arabia --- I still had an irrational fear of somehow artistically repeating myself. And (2), I was not sure if I was emotionally and spiritually up to the task of inhabiting the psyche of one based on those who did us such harm. In order to become this character, to try to capture him fully, I would have to withhold judgment of him. I was not convinced that I could do this.

Over the years, however, I’ve found that if I can just get myself into an open and receptive state of mind, fueled by my own curiosity about who these people are and what may happen next, that is when the fiction itself begins to dictate what must stay and what must go. I had originally hoped that April’s time in the Champagne Room with Bassam al-Jizani was all we would need of him, but eventually the story began to insist --- no matter how I felt about it --- that this young Saudi have his own sections, that he be as much a part of the novel as everyone else.

I stopped writing and spent the next few months doing research. I read the history of Saudi Arabia. I read about Islam. I read the Quran. I read every reputable book published about September 11. (Two of the most helpful were The Looming Tower by Lawrence Wright and The Far Enemy by Fawaz Gerges.) I spent time with an expert on the Arab world, and I interviewed a Palestinian woman who’d lived in Saudi Arabia. And I kept reading.

When I went back to the writing of this novel, I tried to be as loyal to historical facts as possible. The experience of Bassam al-Jizani is consistent with all that we know of these young men: the touchstones of their childhood, their disaffection, their drift into Islamic extremism, their actual training, their vows to one another, and their route from Saudi Arabia to the United States. While most of the names are fictionalized --- Bassam al-Jizani is a name I made up but one that is consistent with family names from the southwestern province of Saudi Arabia --- those of Mohammed Atta and Osama Bin Laden are not. Atta was called Amir by close friends and family. Bin Laden’s men call him Abu Abdullah, which means Father of Abdullah, a common way to address a man in that part of the world, to call him the father of his oldest son.

There are many details in this novel that are historically accurate: These young men were seen in gyms and on mopeds on beaches in the same Florida towns depicted here; before leaving Florida just days before the attacks, they wired thousands of dollars back to Dubai. Once in Boston, some stayed at the Charles Hotel in Cambridge, the hotel in the novel; others stayed across the Charles River in Boston, and two there are known to have hired a prostitute. The wording of the The Last Night comes directly from the actual document found left behind in their hotel rooms, and, after the attacks, agents from the Sarasota office of the FBI did interview some of the women who’d danced for these men.

I stayed loyal to the historical record here so that I could more deeply and honestly become Bassam al-Jizani. I had no desire to write about September 11. But to write stories is to paint our dream world, to move through shadow. There is a saying from the ancient Chinese: “If the mad dog comes at you, whistle for him.”


© Copyright 2012 by Andre Dubus III. Reprinted with permission by W.W. Norton & Co.. All rights reserved.

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