Dallas Morning News

Dallas Morning News (TX), Feb 24, 2002 p14C.

John Dufresne's third novel, Deep in the Shade of Paradise, is 364 pages
long, including the title page and other frontal matter. Its cover price is
$26.95. That works out to just over 7 cents a page, which makes this
bodacious piece of work one of the great bargains in our overpriced world.
Buy it and rejoice at your good fortune.

Once you have the book in hand, don't be in a hurry to finish it. This is no
quick, superficial, best-selling potboiler. It's a novel to slide into and wallow
in, like a hog in mud.

The only simple thing about Deep in the Shade of Paradise is its plot line, if
you insist that it has a plot: Handsome Grisham Loudermilk is about to marry
beautiful Ariane Trevenor. So relatives, friends and strangers are gathering at
Paradise, the Loudermilk family's ancestral plantation, for the wedding.

The old house is situated near a bizarre little settlement called Shiver-de-
Freeze (a local mangling of the French cheval de frise, or "Horse of
Friesland"), which is in a swamp beside a lake near Monroe, La., due east
on I-20 from Dallas. It's the kind of place where the local park is called the
Social Ocean, the only store is the Black & Lovely Gro., where churches
wear such names as Church of the Day of Wrath at Hand and Fire Baptized
Evangelical Temple of the King, and a sermon is titled: "You Think God's
Just Sitting on His Bohunkus?"

Among the multitude converging into Paradise are Grisham's cousin, Adlai
Birdsong, who immediately falls head-over-heels for the bride-to-be, and
Adlai's kindly mother, Benning, and his father, Royce, who's suffering the
ravages of Alzheimer's disease ("He was getting tired of not being a part of
the world. He felt disconnected, redundant, knew that he was losing what
was important, but didn't understand quite what that was.").

Also appearing - some on purpose, some by accident - are Miranda Ferry,
an unemployed chicken sexer, and her Airstream trailer; country songwriter
and widow Earlene Fontana and her 11-year-old son, Boudou, who's
doomed to remember absolutely everything his senses encounter; lovesick
saloon singer Varden Roebuck; Father Pat, a Catholic priest who has the
hots for the mother of the bride; a pair of conjoined twins called Tous-les-
Deux, who have eyes for Boudou; hellfire preacher Alvin Lee Loudermilk
and his two wives, one of whom he's about to relinquish to the best man, and
many more, including a werewolf.

On the fringe of the crowd, Shiver-de-Freeze's Great Books Club is
preparing a play to perform at the wedding. Its members reject Pyramus and
Thisbe in favor of the sad Louisiana classic "Evangeline." But since the play is
for a wedding, they give it a happy ending. (The script is in the book.)

And there's the author, who keeps butting in with such sideshows as the
story of Parthana Tanzy, who wore her hair in a beehive and prayed to Jesus
to heal her deafness. Jesus told her to visit Dr. Norris Bunch, who found that
Parthana's ears were clogged solid with Queen Helene Super Hold
hairspray.

The author invites the reader to write the story of his/her first love on a blank
page that's provided in the book and post it to Mr. Dufresne in care of the
publisher or e-mail it to johnnybob13@hot mail.com. "Who knows, maybe
he'll collect them in an anthology," he hints.

And he digresses into any number of small treatises on philosophy, religion,
language, memory, death and every subject under the sun. There's even a
digression about digressions. Another digression is an argument between the
story's narrator and its author.

Mr. Dufresne also provides genealogical charts, footnotes and an appendix.

You get the idea.

Deep in the Shade of Paradise is Tristram Shandy Meets A Midsummer
Night's Dream in a Louisiana swamp. It's a warm, sad, wise and hilarious
ride through the carnival of life.

John Dufresne (W.W. Norton, $25.95)