By Robin Hemley.

February 24, 2002

Deep in the Shade of Paradise By John Dufresne,

Norton

Love, the preservation of self through memory and the blot of mortality all come to play in John Dufresne's "Deep in the Shade of Paradise," a bayou-set refashioning of "A Midsummer Night's Dream.

"Various members of the Loudermilk, Birdsong and ill-starred Fontana clans have gathered at Paradise, the Loudermilk family estate in Shiver-de-Freeze, La., for the nuptials of Grisham Loudermilk and Ariane Thevenot. Alas, the groom's cousin, Adlai Birdsong, has fallen madly in love with Ariane and proceeds to do his (un)level-headed best to turn Ariane's attentions away from Grisham and toward him, employing magical love dust and earnest entreaties in this pursuit. Grisham, for his part, isn't doing much to keep Ariane. A bit of a womanizer, Grisham has lately dallied with Miranda, a young vagabond in an Airstream trailer.

That's about as straightforward, plotwise, as this affable, digressive novel gets. To Dufresne, process is definitely more important than product, and watching his literary loop-the-loops as he sets down his convoluted tale is half the pleasure here. A bedevilingly large cast of characters romps through the streets of Shiver-de-Freeze, and the two sets of family trees diagrammed at the front of the book require fairly frequent consultation. Sometimes it's a little exasperating, but for the most part Dufresne's ensemble cast works well together.

The members of the wedding include Boudou Fontana, an 11-year-old cursed with the extraordinary bad luck of the Fontana clan and blessed with a prodigious memory. His mother, Earlene, is a country-and-western songwriter on the verge of leaving her passionless, singing-cowboy boyfriend, Varden. Earlene's cousin Alvin Lee Loudermilk, a disgraced preacher, has returned to Paradise too.

Alvin Lee's congregation in Mer Rouge--the Fire Baptized Evangelical Temple of the King--had a couple of features that distinguished it from other storefront churches: It celebrated the life and wisdom of Elvis Presley ("Elvis did have something to tell us about burning love, did he not? About loving tender, loving true. About not being cruel. And about suspicious minds."), and its members wore love beads and other hippie-era clothes left behind by the building's former occupants. Alvin Lee's heavenly empire collapsed when he took a second wife, Ouida Snead, while still married to his first wife. He has brought both his wives home for the wedding: Lorraine, who was ready to give birth at any moment, and Ouida, who was starting to fall for Grisham's best man, Duane.

Meanwhile, visionary Delano 6smith, is painting a new window of the future over to the Black & Lovely Grocery. Adlai's dad, Royce, is losing his memory to Alzheimer's disease, and Adlai's mother, Benning, is mourning the loss. A couple of "Siberian" twins, Alice and Kate, are swooning for young Boudou, and Father Pat, who will perform the wedding ceremony, is considering leaving the priesthood for Ariane's mother, Melia. And that's not the half of it.

Dufresne never stays with any character for long, as he flips from one consciousness to another with lightning speed. But he makes no apologies for this, classifying no character as minor, interested in the minutiae of each character's life to such a degree that he uses asterisks throughout the book that lead the interested reader to an appendix that explores everything from the luncheon menu at the TLC restaurant to Civil War-era letters written by his characters' progenitors.

In this ambitious and meandering novel, Dufresne takes swipes at memoirs, small-minded academics and literary "rules." An affable if somewhat harried narrator leads us through the briar patch as he and the other characters try to keep their author in line. The author wants nothing more than for his characters to like him, or so the narrator claims, and would keep telling his story forever if only that were possible. It's up to the narrator and the author's editor, Jill, to keep the author, like Puck, from being enchanted and turned into an ass. For the most part, Jill and the narrator succeed admirably.

One of the more inspired and funniest moments of the novel takes place at Ariane and Grisham's wedding when various characters put on a play for the guests. Instead of the story of Pyramus and Thisbe, as in Shakespeare's classic, the folks in Shiver-de-Freeze turn the life of the tragic Arcadian hero Evangeline into a comedy as she is pursued by her love, Gabriel Lajeunesse, and the bayou werewolf Loup Garoup.

Typically, the protagonists in a romantic comedy, in this case Grisham, Ariane and Adlai (to a lesser extent) are the blandest of the cast--though only by comparison--and the ancillary characters tend toward the fantastic. Most classical romantic comedies end with a wedding, but this one ends with a wedding, a death and a birth, an important departure from the mold. All isn't well that ends well here: While Dufresne might seem carefree in his narrative methods, strewing well-turned phrases and characters about like so many garlands and handfuls of wedding rice, his ultimate aims are more serious.

Dufresne takes delight in taking delight--in fact, it's imagination or invention alone, he tells us, that keeps oblivion at bay, at least temporarily. And if, despite our dalliances, our loves and our imaginations set to full blast, we are still finally fooling ourselves, all the more reason to seize the literary day and enjoy the party.