For a guy known for his devastating novels about the human condition, Andre Dubus III sure sounds cheerful. He's gregarious and upbeat, the sort of writer who sneaks in quick workouts between interviews and happily chats about non-literary matters, say, the virtues of the wide-open kitchen in the house north of Boston that he built for his family .

''We lived in a cramped little apartment our whole lives,'' he says, laughing. ``Sixteen years! The kids slept in one bed. So I overcompensated. I wanted a house big enough to play football in, and we do.''

So . . . no. He's not pessimistic about modern life, no matter how many dark turns -- kidnapping, abuse, suicide, mass murder -- the plots of his novels take.

''I don't consciously have a dark view,'' Dubus says, turning thoughtful. ``I love this country. There's not a better country to be a writer in, with the First Amendment and all the publishers here. But as a parent, I find there are a lot of things going on that are shallow and narcissistic and greedy and wrong. But I'm not conscious of that when I'm writing. Fiction writing is intuitive, a dip into the dream world. I like that about it.''

Yet the world into which Dubus delves in his new work, The Garden of Last Days (Norton, $24.95) is too precarious, too fragile, to be anything but real. Dubus, who teaches at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell and appears Thursday at Books & Books in Coral Gables, sets his novel -- which comes nine long years after the wrenching National Book Award finalist House of Sand and Fog -- in the late summer of 2001, in and around a Sarasota strip club.

With her usual babysitter in the hospital, frazzled dancer April brings 3-year-old Franny to the Puma Club for Men, sure the house mother will watch the child. As the night wears on, April will dance for a mysterious and menacing young Middle Eastern man named Bassam, who has a fistful of cash, a conflicted conscience and an agenda that will change the world.

There are other characters, too: the elderly babysitter, Jean, so devoted she flees the hospital early; lonely bouncer Lonnie, who excels at maintaining order but not at getting what he truly wants; drunk, disgruntled club patron A.J., humiliated and furious, who makes an appalling decision for what he believes are noble reasons.

The beauty of such diverse narrators is this: Dubus' characters ''feel like real people, full of genuine grief, anger, hope, love, spirituality, and terror,'' writes Stephen King in a gushing, full-page essay in Entertainment Weekly. ``They rise from the page.''

SON OF MASTER

Dubus, son of short-story master Andre Dubus, who died in 1999, and cousin to suspense writer James Lee Burke, says the origin of Garden was the image of a wad of cash on a bureau. It belonged, he realized, to a stripper, one of the women who danced for a 9/11 hijacker. So how to get from that slim but intriguing concept to a 500-plus-page novel?

''[Novelist] Ron Carlson had a few things to say about details,'' says Dubus, 48, whose birthday is, ironically, Sept. 11. 'He said, `Details are for the writer the only instruments by which we steer.' A lot of beginning writers think details are the garnish on the plate, but they're everything. For instance, I'm talking to you from my Philly hotel room, and it's a sunny day, and I'm getting ready for a run. But if I were looking out at a cold day, a rain storm, I'd be having a different human moment with you. I might have an association with cold rain that puts me in a funk and makes me more monosyllabic. Or I think, 'I can't run in that,' and I'm bitchy, and I take it out on you. All this stuff is germane to the writing process. One thing leads to another.''

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