BOOKS: Living in Paradise

ED GRAY

ARKANSAS DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE

Imagine for a little bit that the woman in the painting on this page (done in acrylic, by the way, and
just possibly for sale, but you'd have to work that out with the artist, Mr. Deering), the woman who
is asleep with the book all bent like it shouldn't be (warping the spine, as any librarian would tell
you), is Earlene deBastrop Fontana.

Maybe the woman on the left is Benning Birdsong, wife of Royce, who is rapidly losing his memory
to Alzheimer's, mother of Rylan (little Rylan long dead of spinal meningitis), and Adlai, a fine young
man and a wonderful cook who looks out for his mama and daddy, a young man who just wants to
find love but worries that he never will.

Possibly the woman on the right is ... well, maybe she's Miranda Ferry, who lives in a silver
Airstream and has just quit her job as a chicken sexer and is thinking about going on up to Memphis
to find herself, or maybe she's Ariane Thevanot, who is about to marry Grisham Loudermilk at the
Loudermilk family plantation Paradise, the same Grisham who has just had a fling, on his way to the
wedding, with Miranda in her Airstream.

Ariane doesn't seem to see that Grisham is just like any other semi-educated Southern cad you'd
meet in a bar in Monroe, La., and might turn out that way, too. We don't know about that yet. You
have to get to the end of the book to find that out. (Monroe, you'll recall, is the "City of Steady
Habits, Crossroads of Pipelines, Corrugated Paper Capital of the North Delta Parishes.")

That setting in our painting could well be Shiver-de-Freeze (French name, cheval de frise), a place
near Monroe, but a political subdivision that has it's own time zone. There's that famous hanging
moss. A shooting star (or, who knows, maybe the artist thought of it not as a shooting star at all but
as an asteroid on its way to blast the bejesus out of Asuncion, Paraguay) blazes over the Louisiana
sky.

We'll call it a shooting star. Why involve the innocent when you can help it? Is it midsummer night,
and is it a midsummer night's dream Earlene is having? A midsummer night's dream certainly does
play a part in the novel, as do love, death, family ties, imagination and memory.

Or is it just springtime in a warmer clime? Let's call the season spring (since we are going to be
talking about spring books here--a coincidence, sure, and about which more later), what do we care
what the artist thought, he's already got his commission, and certainly not from yours truly.

Let's say the book being read by Earlene Fontana, mother of Boudou Fontana, the 11-year-old with
the eidetic memory and the last of the Fontana line, was one titled Deep in the Shade of Paradise,
by John Dufresne (W.W. Norton, $25.95). And let's say it's a sort-of sequel to the novel
Louisiana Power & Light (1994), although the author wouldn't want that to be said, fearing sales
would be hurt by the mention of the dreaded word "sequel."

But don't let that put you off, the history is all here in one volume, the story of the ill-fated Fontana
clan, how they were the most executed white family in Louisiana and the one most in need of
medical care ("bad water in the gene pool"). In the front of the new book there are family trees for
both the Fontana and the Loudermilk clans, which helps. There's also a wrap-it-all-up epilogue and
a handy appendix to handle all the footnotes, in which the author gets to flesh out his story because
his editor at W.W. Norton didn't think the extra stuff worked in the main narrative.

In LP&L you would have read about Billy Wayne Fontana's sad (or perhaps timely) demise in a
nest of snakes. How his sons Duane and the deformed Moon Pie met violent ends. How Billy
Wayne fathered Boudou (Bergeron Boudeleaux deBastrop Fontana) with Earlene after divorcing
Tammy Lynne Curry. And if you haven't read LP&L, shame on you anyway. You could wait for the
film, with Billy Bob Thornton, the last we heard, but the book is always better than the "film."

There were 192 characters in Dufresne's last book, Love Warps the Mind a Little--someone
counted. There have to be more in this one, including Huey P. Long, who comes to Shiver-de-
Freeze to show his appreciation for the folks' votes and wants to build them a highway. He is
rebuffed. These people don't like the "kleptocrats" in Baton Rouge.

There is Delano 6smith ("big 6, little s"), a folk painter/philosopher; Macky Ptak, a hair stylist at
Pug's Curl Up and Dye who finally realizes he's gay; Durwood Tulliver, a radio preacher on the
Holy Minute program that everyone seems to listen to; the Tous-les-Deux girls, cojoined twins who
take a shine to Boudou.

There's a letter from Jesse James, who seems to have known some Fontanas. Charlton Heston
makes a surprising appearance in the epilogue, only to be killed off by a crazed gunman at an NRA
convention. The Democrats and Republicans finally merge after realizing that their politics are the
same, thus saving a lot of money on campaigns. You'll need a marker to keep track, or a second
reading.

Grisham's cousin, Adlai, falls in love with bride-to-be Ariane; Father Pat, here at Shiver-de-Freeze
to do the nuptials, falls in love with the bride's mother; Grisham's college pal Duane (Prisock, not the
ill-fated Duane Fontana) falls for one of the wives of ex-evangelist Alvin Lee Loudermilk. There's
the Black & Lovely Grocery Store and the Dispersed of Judah cemetery. And there's Grisham's
final story, actually every character's final story, but you'll have to read the epilogue for that.

Just as in his previous novels, Dufresne, a teacher of fiction at Florida International University,
offers--in digressions--his theories of fiction writing, addressing the reader directly, which was a
trick Henry Fielding used in the novel Tom Jones. In Paradise, Dufresne stops the action to
summarize a chapter, just as Flann O'Brien did in his 1951 novel At Swim-Two-Birds. Dufresne
even offers a blank page for the reader to write his memory of the first person he loved and an e-
mail address to send it with an offer that the best ones might be put into an anthology johnnybob13
@hotmail.com).

This kind of writing is now called "metafiction." With Dufresne, it's just old storytelling, and it's the
best writing to come down the pike in a good many years. When you get to the end, you'll want to
start over.

This article was published on Sunday, February 17, 2002

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