![]() ![]() Kathy again tries to kill herself with pills, but Nadereh saves her by inducing her to vomit. Massoud finds her in her car drunkenly unable to discharge the gun, and brings her inside. Now aware that Lester is in trouble, Kathy calls her brother Frank, but cannot bring herself to admit that she is homeless, and he is unable to help her.ĭespondent, Kathy first considers driving to the house and burning it, but after becoming drunk attempts suicide in the driveway with Lester's sidearm instead. Massoud reports this to the police and identifies Lester from a photo, resulting in a reprimand by internal affairs, and gives Kathy a furious warning to back off and leave him and his family alone. ![]() Using a pseudonym, Lester confronts Massoud and threatens to have him deported if he refuses to sell the house back to the county. Massoud refuses and angrily forces Kathy back into her car.ĭesperate for help, Kathy seeks out Lester and seduces him into abandoning his wife and children and becoming her protector. Informed that her only option is to sue the county, Kathy instead tries to convince Massoud to sell back the house for what he paid by telling him she and her brother inherited it from their father. Massoud, having already spent money on improving the house, is unwilling to accept anything less than the much higher appraised value of the property, which the county refuses to pay. Taking Lester's advice, Kathy finds an attorney who assures her that because of the county's mistake, they will return Massoud's money and the house will be restored to her. Nadereh and Esmail treat her wound, but her jealousy at seeing how the Behranis have settled in only makes her more determined to get her house back. The next morning Kathy is angered to see her house being renovated and confronts the workers, injuring her foot. ![]() Having nowhere else to go, she spends the night in her car outside her home. Meanwhile, Kathy is evicted from the motel she is staying in. Seeing the auction of Kathy's house in the newspaper, he buys it for a quarter of its actual value, intending to improve and sell the house. Living beyond his means, he maintains the façade of a respectable businessman so as not to shame his wife Nadereh, son Esmail, and daughter Soraya. Telling Kathy that her home is to be auctioned off, Burdon feels sympathy for her, helps her move out and advises her to seek legal assistance to regain her house.Ī former Imperial Iranian Army Colonel Massoud Amir Behrani who fled his homeland with his family, now lives in the Bay Area working multiple menial jobs. Assuming the misunderstanding was cleared up months ago, she is surprised when Sheriff's Deputy Lester Burdon arrives to forcibly evict her. Dubus uses this recurrent theme to critique the superficiality of social interaction.Abandoned by her husband, recovering drug addict Kathy Nicolo, living alone in a small house near the San Francisco Bay Area, ignores eviction notices erroneously sent to her for nonpayment of business taxes. As the character who has fallen the furthest, Behrani is most prone to such feelings, although they deeply affect almost everyone in the novel. This establishes a pattern that Dubus builds upon throughout the novel, in which the thing that leads to a character’s shame isn’t the content of a given interaction or statement but its broader social context. It isn’t until he walks in on the clerk helping a wealthy couple that his seemingly innocuous question-“May I help you, sir?” (22)-causes Behrani to feel a tremendous sense of shame at the dirty nature of his work. When he enters the lobby, the clerk asks him if he needs help, of which at first Behrani takes little heed. Every day he parks in a garage belonging to an expensive hotel. This theme is thoroughly established in the novel’s first chapter, which describes Behrani’s shame at being negatively judged for working as a manual laborer. One of the themes Dubus explores most intently explores how people misperceive each other even as they fear others might hastily judge them. ![]()
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