Welcome to John Dufresne’s Louisiana backwater, Shiver-de-Freeze, population 375, where folks sport handles like Jinx, Comfort, and Ferlin, declare their amorous intentions on the local water tower, say things like yonder, fetched, and you might could have, and refer to their kin as being high tempered, weak in the intellectuals, or economical with the truth. Yes, Dufresne’s new novel, Deep in the Shade of Paradise, is chock-full of the homespun cornpone and magical touches that made his first full-length, Louisiana Power & Light, a darling among critics on both sides of the Mason Dixon line. Sadly, his new work, a sequel of sorts, does not build on the success of the previous story but instead bogs down in the author’s inability to keep out of his colorful characters’ way.
The novel ostensibly chronicles the wedding of Grisham Loudermilks and Ariane Thevenot. But Grisham’s cousin Adlai who falls in love with the bride-to-be — and the groom’s philandering ways — threaten to derail the festivities. Adlai’s reckless crush occurs even as his mother passes away; his father struggles with the onset of Alzheimer’s; the priest renounces his celibacy; his cousin gives birth; and conjoined twins fall for 11-year-old Boudou, an eidetic who happens to be the last of the Fontana clan, the most executed white family in Louisiana history (and the protagonists of Dufresne’s first novel).
But what should be a story rich in possibilities is marred by Dufresne’s multiple forays into the text, both as author and narrator, which come across as misguided, and often insulting, attempts to help the reader get it: Complications arise from the conflicting needs of narrator and author, Dufresne barges in at one point. We tell the story, but he writes it. Our needs are literary and dramatic; his needs are emotional and, frankly, embarrassing. Our author — and we don’t mean to be coy here — seems driven by a lamentable and peculiar need to be loved by his characters.
Coy is exactly how Dufresne comes across in this Creative Writing 101 lecture. Earlier, in a chapter portentously entitled “Plots Are for Graveyards,” the story grinds to a halt for six interminable pages while Dufresne engages the reader in an inescapable, significant, and illuminating digression on the nature of digressions.
Then, in an absurd twist suggesting a self-help book, Dufresne asks the reader to write their own digression, conscientiously providing a blank page for the task. Thank you, Mr. Reading on the Left Side of the Brain.
This disconcerting intrusion effectively kills any momentum the story has built. The digressions that follow — and many are entertaining if not exactly significant and illuminating — seem tainted by these readers’club-like injunctions.
It’s too bad. Dufresne is a talented writer, at his best when summoning scenery, developing sympathetic protagonists and exchanging rapid-fire dialogue. He juggles multiple plot lines like spinning plates (until the interruptions), and his portrayal of Adlai’s father, Royce, as he slips into the fog of Alzheimer’s, is wonderfully poignant.
Dufresne can also be funny. One character recalls her Acapulco solo singing debut; another claims Adlai would make a good preacher if “we could just get you to believe in Jesus Christ”; another suggests that even though he’s no Norman Einstein, he’s commenced to think.
It would be shooting fish in a barrel to ridicule these bayou trailer dwellers if Dufresne didn’t have a knack for making them sympathetic, as he did in Louisiana Power & Light. The problem with Deep in the Shade of Paradise is that Dufresne feels he has to remind the reader of his largesse.
When two characters discuss an article in the Quarterly Review of Southern Literature, in which the author (of the article) decries that Southern fiction has become a sanctuary for deviants, monsters, freaks, the miserable, the evil, and the downtrodden, Dufresne’s characters want to know what’s so grotesque about girls with wooden legs or farmers with snaggled teeth, or alcoholics or dirt roads or unbottled water. Relax, one character says to the other, nobody pays any mind to academics. They’re just writing for each other. It’s a pissing contest. A pissing contest the reader, like it or not, is now party to.
Finally, Dufresne insinuates himself into the text one last time, claiming to be frustrated with his own book and threatening to write a memoir like everyone else is doing.
It’s meant to be funny, but it comes off like a cheap shot, one Dufresne and his readers could do without. If only the author would stick to his characters’ stories instead of his own.
This article appears in Feb 28 – Mar 6, 2002.
