House of Sand and Fog by Andre Dubus III

He helps her move and later sets her up in a motel.

Her husband, Nick, left her eight months before and she has ignored notices coming from San Mateo County telling her she still owes taxes on the house (SM County thought her house was a business property and accidentally taxed her and both Kathy and Nick got their paperwork notorized saying it wasn’t, but somehow SM County didn’t get the message).She gets evicted by Deputy Sherriff Burdon, who immediately takes a liking to her. She’s in her mid-thirties, goes braless and shoeless on a regular basis and is also a manipulator who lets fear take over her life. She a recovered drug/alcohol addict who is a cleaning lady. Kathy was a hard character to like and I did try.

where Kathy Nicola used to live only days before. Torn by class, money, culture and appearances, Behrani wants to do the best thing for his family and that’s buying an auctioned house for $45,000 in Corona on Bisgrove St.

She does and now Behrani must do something so that his 14-year-old son, Esmail can go to college and the family can be comfortable. They rent an apartment that costs them over $4,000 a month and Behrani works two jobs so that Soriya will find a suitable husband. He moves his wife, son and daughter to Berkeley, where Soriya will have a chance to marry well. Behrani used to be a high ranking Air Force officer in Iran in the days of the Shah, but after his family’s exile, he knows he can never reclaim his past glory. As a side note, check out this link to see a picture of the house they used in the movie, which is now for sale.Ĭol. But no matter, if the town is a stand-in, the emotions in this book are not. Behind them was the highway, and I could see cars and long trucks going south for towns like Hillsborough, San Carlos, Menlo Park, Los Altos, and Sunnyvale…” The descriptions are so accurate I thought Corona was a real town, but, alas, it is the stand-in for Pacifica. Under the gray sky we passed one-story houses with small grass lawns.

Dubos’s descriptions of the town are so precise: “We rode quietly through Corona (where the titular house is located on Bisgrove St)into San Bruno, where he (Lester) turned north just before the El Camino Real Highway. Behrani, Kathy Nicola and Lester Burdon) indelible, he also makes the suburbs of San Francisco and Kathy’s Pontiac Bonneville also important characters. But after reading the book, Andre Dubus III makes not only his three main characters (Col. I knew going in that “House of Sand and Fog” would be hard-to-put down novel that was vastly depressing since I had seen the 2003 film and still think it’s one of the best movies of this decade.

House of Sand and Fog by Andre Dubus III