Book feature: Excuse the digressions
Dufresne revels in showing readers different paths

By Jay MacDonald, Special to The News-Press

Shakespeare in the swamp anyone?

If the idea of adding a soupcon of Cajun seasoning to "A Midsummer Night’s Dream" whets your reading appetite, welcome to Shiver-de-Freeze, La., where the Loudermilks and Fontanas have gathered for the wedding of Grisham and Ariane at the Fontana ancestral home, Paradise.

Preparations are well under way, despite the fact that Grisham’s notorious wandering eye keeps wandering toward former lover Miranda, who lives in an Airstream and concocts meals that defy description, even by Cajun standards.

Not that Ariane is the model of self-control exactly, thanks to the entreaties of Grisham’s cousin Adlai, a love-at-first-sight casualty who won’t take maybe for an answer.

Could she have found her true soul mate at this late and inconvenient hour?

Ah, sweet complications.

Take (at least) two star-crossed lovers, apply the full weight and expectations of their enormous, eccentric clans and you have "Deep in the Shade of Paradise," John Dufresne’s big-hearted, cast-of-thousands swamp opera and semi-sequel to his well-received 1994 debut, "Louisiana Power & Light."

Dufresne, dubbed the John Irving of the South for his lyrical voice and quirky characters, dons two hats here, as narrator and author, allowing him to both convey the story and comment upon it.

Why? The simple answer: Dufresne has a lot to say, not just about the noteworthy goings-on of Shiver-de-Freeze and its Mayberry-on-mescaline inhabitants, but about love, death, memory and imagination. Two narrators worth of material.

It’s a technique that plays well to Dufresne’s infinite playfulness. Here, he considerately interrupts the narrative to alert the reader not to start a particularly lengthy chapter if they don’t have the time. There, he pops in to encourage the reader to write about their first love, leaves them a blank page to do so, and even offers to read it via e-mail.

He had so much material, in fact, that he decided to relegate some of it to footnotes —— very, very funny footnotes —— in the epilogue rather than tear the heart out of the piece.

The equally endearing footnotes include the luncheon menu at the TLC Café; the full story of the short life and violent death of Seal Boy; the words and music to "In Our Boathouse, an original ballad by one of his characters; a recipe for poached eggs; and the following bit of philosopher humor:

"Jean-Paul Sartre walks into a café in the 2nd Arrondisement. Finally the waitress arrives. Sartre asks her for a coffee without cream.

She says, ‘‘Monsieur Sartre, I’m so sorry. We are out of cream today.’’

‘‘All right, then, I’ll have it without milk.’’ "

Which is all to underscore the obvious: Dufresne is a digression addict.

"I enjoy them. My favorite novel, in a way, is probably (Laurence Sterne’s) ‘‘Tristam Shandy.’’ That’s all digression; we never actually get to the life and opinions of Tristam Shandy because he keeps talking about his uncle and everything else. That’s probably a big influence on my life and probably specifically on this book," he says.

It could be argued that Dufresne, as a Southern writer, has a right and proper claim to his digression obsession. The only problem is, despite his mastery of the vernacular, rhythm, pace and minutiae of everyday life in rural Louisiana, Dufresne is a certified Yankee.

Born and raised in Worcester, Mass., he earned his MFA from the University of Arkansas and taught at the University of Louisiana at Monroe and Augusta College in Augusta, Georgia. In 1989, Les Standiford recruited him to join the nascent creative writing program at Florida International University, a "dream job" he has never left.

It doesn’t bother Dufresne to be labeled a Southern writer; he takes it as a compliment, though he makes no such claim for himself.

"Even before I went down there, what I loved in literature was Southern literature, so I felt that, imaginatively, I had been living here for a long time through the works of Faulkner and O’Connor and Welty. Those are my favorite writers. I felt like I had been inhabiting at least the fictional South for a long time," he says.

But he does take offense at the New York-centric definition of regional writing.

"If you’re from New York, then you’re a writer, but if you’re from anywhere outside of New York, then you’re a regional writer," he says. "That’s ridiculous; everyone writes from a region. Your region is Manhattan or Monroe, Louisiana, it’s the same, and you try to reflect the life there. But often when they say Southern, they mean in pejoratively; they mean you can write about that place but you can’t write about the big themes."

It took time —— five years more or less —— to squeeze Dufresne’s hyperactive imagination between the covers of "Deep in the Shade of Paradise."
"

It’s hard but it’s a pleasure. I couldn’t imagine myself not doing it at all. I’m still a very inefficient writer; I still write longhand on a legal pad and rewrite often so it takes me a long time. I’m not bothered by that; it just takes me longer in terms of writing."

In the final draft, Dufresne’s sheer compassion for his characters succeeds in populating Shiver-

de-Freeze with flesh-and-blood characters, not mere sketches or board-game pieces.

"I try to think of them as people instead of as characters," he says. "I know that every character who comes into a book has a book of their own somewhere, a whole story of their own. I try to at least touch on that, to allude to what might be the trouble in their lives or the joy in their lives, because I think it rounds them out. They’re not just figures, they’re not there for a purpose, they’re there because they’re people. I try to sort of suggest at least what their narrative might be; since I can’t get around to telling it, here’s a sentence or two about them. It deepens them, I hope."