Near the end of "Townie," the flinty-eyed memoir he published last year, Andre Dubus III acknowledged that it wasn't always easy sharing a name with his father, the renowned story writer Andre Dubus. "I was treated with a vaguely disguised pity," he writes: "How hard it must be to follow the footsteps of a real master, a writer's writer, to share his name and probably not his gifts." Yet the younger Dubus, who reviews Richard Ford's novel "Canada" on this week's cover, has been writing for more than a quarter of a century now, long enough to establish his own formidable gifts. In five books - including "Townie" and the novel "House of Sand and Fog," both of them best sellers - Dubus has more than made a name for himself. What does he try to accomplish in his work? "It seems to me that the primary job of the artist is to paint the gray," he said via e-mail, "to capture the texture of this life without moralizing or pontificating. This is a sustained act of empathy, and one of the things I admire most about Ford's new novel is how carefully he traces one family's fall into darkness, one small, bad adult decision at a time. What are we turning away from? Our higher selves, I think, that small god in each of us that seems to know better than we do what the right action actually is. I tried to wrestle with all this in "Townie," too. I love this line from Tom Waits's "Heartattack and Vine": "There ain't no devil; there's just God when he's drunk." If I have a theology, that's it.