Boston

BOOK REVIEW
Dufresne spews an outrageous tale of gothic proportions

By Erica Noonan, Globe Staff Correspondent, 2/22/2002

Sometimes a novel can barely be contained within its pages - like an overfilled beer stein, the prose threatens to exuberantly rise above and beyond its boundaries.

This is the case with John Dufresne's latest, ''Deep in the Shade of Paradise,'' a wordy, low-rent Louisiana soap opera of gothic proportions. I suspect that if I had left this novel cracked open on a coffee table for too long, words would have begun spilling out of its pages and pooling on the floor.

But that shouldn't dissuade anyone from taking a deep breath and diving into the continuing saga of the Fontana clan, more or less where Dufresne's 1994 debut ''Louisiana Power & Light'' left off.

This collection of familial oddballs first arrived in the vicinity of the ''boot-shaped'' parish called Shiver-de-Freeze in the 1840s. Since then, Dufresne writes, just about every male Fontana has met an unsavory end at a young age.

''For generations, nothing but illness, depravity, reckless and fatal bravado, improbable accident, all manner of tragedy natural, manufactured, and, some contend, divinely inspired - has visited the children of Peregrine. Clever Fontana, dim Fontana, graceful or clumsy ... or enterprising Fontana - no difference - all of them star-crossed, doomed.''

But the last of the lineage, the final Fontana known as Boudou (rhymes with Who do?), stands a chance of beating the curse at the opening of ''Deep in the Shade.'' As the story opens, the entire community is about to assemble for the wedding of Grisham Loudermilk and Ariane Thevenot at her family's ancestral home, Paradise.

But Grisham's cousin, Adlai Birdsong, threatens to throw a wrench in the works by suddenly falling in love with Ariane. The minister, Father Pat McDermott, has his own problems. He's in love with Ariane's mother. And as it turns out, groom-to-be Grisham, of all people, hasn't been as faithful to his betrothed as everyone might have hoped.

This is just the beginning of an unwieldy tale that meanders all over northeastern Louisiana, stopping off for a glass of lemonade with dozens of characters and caricatures with names like Moon Pie, Ransom, Varden, Earlene, Sukey, and Starkey, not to mention a pair of conjoined twins named Tous-les-Deux. In one of the book's best scenes, we watch one of the main characters toast an adulterous tryst with the Shiver-de-Freeze delicacy known as ''soup on the rocks,'' a cocktail of canned beef broth poured over ice doused with a dribble of lemon concentrate.

There are so many characters, vivid details, and story threads here; readers will have no choice but to flip back and forth to a set of family trees in the front of the book. But as the author himself asserts midway through, ''plots are for graveyards.'' This novel is meant to read like a three-ring circus, helped along by an occasional narrator who cuts through the din, offering folksy advice and opinions.

The book goes completely over the top, and stays there, when the reader is instructed to write a few lines of his or her own in a space left blank in the book for this purpose.

But there are a handful of moments where the story gets too outrageous for its own good, scenes that make one wish Dufresne had incorporated some of subtlety and grace found in other recent larger-than-life Louisiana tales, such as ''Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood'' by Rebecca Wells.

But Dufresne manages to pull this novel off, nevertheless. The spirit of this book is just so bighearted, it's nearly impossible for readers not to get swept along as well.

After reading ''Deep in the Shade of Paradise,'' it's hard to believe that author Dufresne grew up just west of Boston in Worcester. But it appears the Massachusetts native, now teaching creative writing in Florida, has found his heart's home in the bayou.