55 pages • 1 hour read
House of Sand and Fog
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Sand and Fog
As the novel’s title suggests, Dubus juxtaposes sand and fog to illustrate the multifaceted, often contradictory nature of the conflict surrounding the beach house. Setting the story in and around California’s Bay Area, famous for the fog that descends over the San Francisco Bay, allows Dubus the opportunity to cast his characters in the bright light of the beach or in the gloom of fog as he sees fit.
The narrative uses the beach to evoke hope and the promise of prosperity. After buying the house at auction, Behrani installs a widow’s walk to provide a view to the ocean and thereby increase the house’s market value. This directly pairs access to the beach with Behrani’s aspirations for a better life for his family. Conversely, the fog represents trouble. This is witnessed early on when, during one of their first encounters, Lester looks out over the bay and remarks to Kathy that the “fog’s coming in” (89). Here, fog foreshadows the trouble that unfolds throughout the novel.
By pairing hope and trouble to natural phenomena, Dubus suggests that the entanglement of positive and negative feelings and actions is as inevitable and unchanging as the fog’s encroachment on the beach. This interlinking evokes the commentary on the American dream, which the novel argues is equally predicated on this mixture of prosperity and suffering.
The Red Bonneville
Kathy’s large, ostentatious car, gifted to her and Nick by her brother Frank, serves as a nexus for the novel’s thematic content as various characters remark upon and interact with it. Dubus uses the Bonneville to comment negatively upon garish, materialistic aspects of American life. When Kathy first mentions it, she explains that neither she nor Nick wanted a large American car, but the two quickly adjusted to its comfort and space on their drive out west to California. This process of easily adjusting to material prosperity is integral Behrani’s critique of America, whose citizens he believes take their comfort for granted. Kathy, because of their conflict, becomes the central focus of his critique. Behrani derisively notes her “expensive sedan” and assumes that she lost the house through her own negligence because she took what she had for granted. In reality, even though Kathy enjoys her car, it symbolizes the overwhelming burden of trust her family has placed in her.
Kathy’s bright car later becomes a liability after she uses it as a getaway vehicle in her drunken robbery of a gas station. The easily identifiable Bonneville, which was meant to bear Kathy away from her life as an addict to a new beginning in California, becomes another reminder of her failure to live up to her family’s expectations. The bright red car betrays Kathy’s wish to hide from her troubled past as it becomes a target on her back following her crime.
The House in Corona
The house, the focus of Kathy and Behrani’s dispute, functions as a neutral playing field for the novel’s conflict. Despite, and because of, this neutral quality, the house comes to represent many different things to various characters. Behrani views it as a financial opportunity, while to Kathy the house represents the expectations and trust her family has placed in her recovery. Dubus takes full advantage of the house’s mutable qualities by playing with characters’ perceptions of its interior. For instance, after her second suicide attempt, Kathy wakes up in the room that formerly served as her bedroom. Confused, Kathy finds herself surrounded by “things [she] knew but didn’t” and feels that the bedroom’s doorknob could just as well have been “the knob of all the doors of all the rooms I’d ever lived in” (293). In her disoriented state, Kathy captures the house’s ability to represent nearly everything to everyone simultaneously—Behrani locates his salvation in the house even as its loss spells ruin for Kathy without there being a contradiction.
Dubus flips this sense of totality in the final description of the house when Behrani returns to assault Kathy and kill Nadi. As Behrani enters the home, it loses any discernible physical qualities, and he crosses what he describes as “a sea of carpet from the house of my mother” (334). Here, the house is again depicted as a jumble of reminders of various homes, but its contradictions are too much for Behrani to bear. In his grief he enters the house without realizing he’s turned the doorknob, and he moves as though in a dream. While Kathy sees the house as a stand-in for everywhere she’s ever lived, its contradictory nature only reminds Behrani just how far from home he feels.
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