Andre Dubus. Broken Vessels: Essays, Boston: David R. Godine, 1991.

In the years before his death by heart attack last year, Andre Dubus (pronounced "dub-YOOSE"), was considered by many readers and writers the best short story writer working in America. As Tobias Wolff notes in the introduction to the present volume, Dubus' fiction is written "in different forms, from varying points of view, in a language that magically strikes just the right note for the story being told. He is . . . a master."

But even among admirers of his fiction, Dubus is perhaps best known for the night in July of 1986 when, driving home from a Boston Red Sox game, he came upon a car stranded with its lights darkened in the third lane of I-93. Dubus stopped to help, and before he and the driver and passenger of the disabled vehicle, Luz Santiago and her brother Luis, could reach the safety of the left side of the highway, Dubus and Luis Santiago were struck by another motorist. Dubus lived.

In Broken Vessels, this short story master turns inward, to the mercurial form of the personal essay. At its worst, the genre seems invented to sell books, advertisement qua product. But at its best, the personal essay binds us morally and spiritually to another person, and again I must invoke Tobias Wolff, who speaks of "the real possibility of the personal essay, which is to catch oneself in the act of being human." That's as good a definition as you're likely to find, and it carries us some distance toward describing the essays Dubus has given us here.

The essays in Broken Vessels span Dubus' life, from his childhood work for a Class C baseball team to his service in the Marines, from graduate school at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop to his career as a writer of short stories, from the accident on Route 93 that changed his life, making him "forever a cripple" to the spiritual crisis that followed and his eventual acceptance of the new dispensation granted him.

Of his work as a baseball shagger at the age of eleven, Dubus writes, "Our pay was a dollar a night. It remains the best job I ever had, but I would have to be twelve and thirteen and fourteen to continue loving it" (ìUnder the Lights"). In "Of Robin Hood and Womanhood," he meditates on socialized behaviors and the role of childhood reading. In "The Judge and Other Snakes," he gives an account of bullies, self-respect, and his experience as a prosecution witness in the criminal courts. In "On Charon's Wharf," Dubus, a Roman Catholic and daily communicant, offers a testament to the importance of sacraments, "these actions which restore our focus, and therefore ourselves."

And we are with him as he relives in memory and on the page the accident that nearly cost him his life, that did cost him a leg, the accident that cost him doubt and spiritual suffering. Dubus shares it all with an honesty devoid of self-pity. At the end of "Lights of the Long Night," he lets us eavesdrop on a telephone conversation with the doctor who saved his life, who tells him what Luz Santiago had said, that in the seconds before being hit, Dubus had pushed her away from the car bearing down on them, into the ditch. The essay, and Dubus' voice, whole and forgiving, remind us that life, in whatever circumstances, in whatever constraints and conditions, is a great gift. Dubus concludes: "I said: Now I can never be angry at myself for stopping that night. He said: Don't ever be. You saved that woman's life. Perhaps not. She may have survived, as I have. I am forever a cripple, but I am alive, and I am a father and a husband, and in 1987 I am sitting in the sunlight of June and writing this."

A couple of years before Dubus died, one of his closest friends told me, "Andre's no saint," a reminder that his strengths as a writer and as a person came from his daily battles against egotism and need, desire and despair.

To read the essays inBroken Vessels, or those in Dubus' later Meditations from a Moveable Chair, is to come into contact with that good man whom Flannery O'Connor advised us was so hard to find, a man who when it counted acted out of a duty practiced until it had become instinctive, a man who paid a heavy price for assisting people in need, a man who fought with himself and his God to come to terms with his wheelchair and his reduced ability to participate in the physical life he so much enjoyed.

But mostly it is to come into contact with goodness itself, divorced from the ego of any one person, a clear spirit manifested in unmannered, honest prose, in writing from the heart.

David Thoreen teaches writing and literature at Assumption College in Worcester MA.