A haunting memoir from the 'poet of the inarticulate'
American Ghosts: A Memoir
By David Plante
Beacon, 288 pp., $24
David Plante is the kind of novelist who's best when he's telling the truth. The many admirers of his work may have met him through one of the autobiographical Francoeur novels -- "The Woods," "The Family," and "The Country." Or we've read "Difficult Women," his small masterpiece of literary portraiture.
Like those novels, "American Ghosts" describes Plante's early upbringing in a particularly insular parish in Providence during the 1940s and '50s. One of seven sons of French-Canadian parents, and the second from the youngest, Plante is born with an almost prehensile interest in all he finds in his physical surroundings coupled with a sympathetic awareness of individuals that borders on hypervigilance.
His French-speaking parents live in the French parish in which the Roman Catholicism they practice diverges radically from that of more recent immigrants -- Irish, Italians, and Poles -- who assimilate more quickly. Plante and his brothers, on the other hand, attend school where the nuns give lessons in their oddly antiquated Normandy dialect, teaching residents of "La Nouvelle France," a place that disappeared from maps of the New World at the end of the French and Indian Wars. The Plantes had been on this continent for 14 generations by the time of the author's childhood but were still as French-hearted as their fictional name implies.
A people surrounded and held isolated will find themselves becoming not only what they are but more so. So it is with the Plantes and the others in their parish. They are fixed in a medieval church centuries removed from modern-day Catholicism. And the woods of Plante's boyhood seem to abut the continental wilderness still possessed by the spirits of his Blackfoot ancestors, some of his American ghosts.
In the mind-numbing claustrophobia of a shuttered house in this closed-in parish where she is not allowed to have a Protestant friend, Plante's mother spends frequent Sunday afternoons pacing the room until she comes to the wall. She strikes it, crying: "I don't want to die in this closed-in house. I want to know the outside world." While her husband and other sons are powerless to lift her from her misery, Plante understands that he is being given a benediction: "I felt a thrill, a rush that started at my feet and ran up through my legs and torso and neck and out the top of my head, and I felt lifted out of myself." His mother cannot get out, but she is instructing him to go, in order to save himself.
The writer quits his parish, his town, and finally his country. In Europe the year after college he falls in love with Nikos, his life partner. Although this love brings Plante peace and happiness, the church of the nuns in his old French parish condemns it. Plante is too honest to continue practicing his religion, though the loss of his faith is an active and ongoing grief.
Robert Nye, of The Guardian, calls Plante our "poet of the inarticulate," whose being oblivious to nothing is both a curse and a blessing. This is a story of spiritual growth from a blind and trusting allegiance through many decades of doubt. What can a thoughtful person use, Plante wonders, to replace the harsh and eternally punishing God of his Catholic youth? This vengeful God is another of Plante's American ghosts. The peace he arrives at comes only after his long search for the boy he'd been and the discovery and understanding of the man he has become:
"I had committed sins of more than lying . . . and my biggest sin, I knew more and more, was my possessiveness. My biggest sin, which was to want everything, had become grotesque in me, and my envy of anyone I thought had anything I didn't have was commensurate with my possessiveness. . . . I felt if I couldn't have everything, then everything should be destroyed, and everything others had in terms of success and money and good looks and sex should be taken away from them and they left overwhelmed by failure."
The sin of envy can be called the writer's sin in that by accurately describing what one loves, ownership is achieved. Naming, as every good writer knows, is another way of having, and naming as accurately as Plante does is to participate in creation.
This wonderful book takes on what may be the hardest questions by allowing this most observant individual to see and hear in miraculous detail. How, it asks, does any person become American, let alone find a place in the breathing cathedral that is this majestic universe?
Jane Vandenburgh is the author of the novels "Failure to Zigzag" and "The Physics of Sunset." She lives in Morgan County, W.Va., and in Washington, D.C.
