By ERIC MILES WILLIAMSON
DEEP IN THE SHADE OF PARADISE.
By John Dufresne.
Norton, $25.95.
THERE'S something afoot in Southern novels these days, and John Dufresne, author of The Way That Water Enters Stone, Louisiana Power & Light and Love Warps the Mind a Little, is right in the center of it in his new novel, Deep in the Shade of Paradise.
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Family sagas are nothing new to Southern writers. And there's something about the communal solitude, the brooding humid summers, the gray but not dead winters, the kuzdu creeping up trees and the ruins of abandoned houses, something about the unknowable and unspeakable secrets of the fallen people of the Confederacy, that inspires Southern writers to imagine the unknowable, to speak the unspeakable. Dufresne, whose novel Louisiana Power & Light is being made into a movie starring Billy Bob Thornton, is tapped into the core of the contemporary Southern novel's soul.
Deep in the Shade of Paradise, despite being only 364 pages, is ambitious, sprawling and highly complex if not confusing. Set in a town called Shiver-de-Freeze in northern Louisiana, the novel tells the story of the marriage of Grisham Loudermilk and Ariane Thevenot. The problem is that Grisham's cousin Adlai Birdsong is in love with Ariane.
But this is just the loose premise, the skeleton around which Dufresne weaves an extraordinarily complex plot so digressive that the book is reminiscent of 18th-century British novelist Laurence Sterne's masterpiece, Tristram Shandy. Complete with footnotes and appendices, Deep in the Shade of Paradise is no easy read and is probably a book that requires two readings at the least to unravel, even for a seasoned bibliophile. There are so many characters and people referred to -- often 15 to 20 per page -- that the family trees that preface the book are not only helpful but crucial.
Dufresne knows his novel is complex and loosely plotted, and he periodically cuts into the narrative with self-reflexive commentaries on storytelling and writing. Deep in the Shade of Paradise, in postmodern fashion, is as much about storytelling as it is about the story it tells. Dufresne writes:
There's always at least two stories, the one you set out to tell and the one you discover along the way; the one you know about, the one you don't. The intentional and the actual, you could say. ... And maybe our intentions are not as significant as our discoveries. Maybe what you hear is more important that what we say.
A believer in the ultimate power of the idea of "story," Dufresne's narrator tells us that
we learn everything from stories, including all matters scientific. Science and fiction are both stories. Science is a story that someone's trying to prove; fiction is a story that defines a truth. Science is God's story; fiction is ours. Science is reductive; fiction expansive. Science seeks answers; fiction, questions.
He's insistent in his defense of his mode of storytelling, in his idea that a story is process and engagement and not merely a series of cause-and-effect relationships, that perhaps all causes and effects are interrelated. At one point in the novel, Dufresne spends an entire chapter discussing the nature of digression:
Since nothing in the world is trivial to storytellers, since there is nothing that does not require their attention, since any object or idea can become the focus of the storyteller's curiosity, and since it is the storyteller's job to see the world in an unhabitual way, to apprehend what is there, not what's supposed to be there, and since most of what absorbs a storyteller is what others neglect to see, and since storytellers by nature are collectors of irrelevant and inconsiderable information and are in the habit of making impulsive and intuitive connections between the world and memory, between the here and now and the there and then, and since a story is not a logical construct, but is instead arbitrary, opportunistic, whimsical, unpredictable if inevitable, then it would seem that digression will be inescapable, significant, and illuminating.
What follows is an extended definition of digression and its philosophical and practical use in fiction.
Dufresne is interested in experimenting not only with plot structure but with the language itself, with how to create beauty and meaning with mere words typed on the page. He writes that "you should not be allowed to play with words until you respect them." Dufresne obviously respects words, and the way he plays with them is at times as splendid as any writer at work today.
The self-referential digressions aside, Deep in the Shade of Paradise is a moving, highly textured novel of keen perception of the ways people behave, of their troubles and their recognitions of the beauties that we can find even in swamps and trailer parks.
The cast is a host of grotesques the likes of which Flannery O'Connor explored in her short stories and longer works. In Dufresne's skillful hands these grotesques become people we know and -- whether we want to or not -- understand.
Discussing an article they had read in the Quarterly Review of Southern Literature, in which the article's author writes that "Southern fiction has become ... a sanctuary for deviants, monsters, freaks, the miserable, the evil, and the downtrodden, the wretched, and the enfeebled," one character wants to know of another, "What's so grotesque about infirmity, about girls with wooden legs or farmers with snaggled teeth, or alcoholics or dirt roads or unbottled water or unreliable automobiles ... or raggedy wardrobes." These are the kinds of people who populate Dufresne's Shiver-de-Freeze, La., and with Dufresne doing the writing, there's nothing grotesque about them at all. Deep in the Shade of Paradise is an achievement of the first order by an author of the first rank.
Eric Miles Williamson edits the American Book Review and is on the board of directors of the National Book Critics Circle.