In 'Requiem,' Dufresne overdoes the dysfunction

JOHN DUFRESNE (J. Tomas Lopez)

Requiem, Mass.
By John Dufresne
Norton, 316 pp., $24.95

I admire John Dufresne's early work, especially "Louisiana Power and Light" and "Love Warps the Mind a Little," two books that provided readers deeply affecting stories told from odd angles of perception. The result in those works was what we all look for in books: good stories well told.

But - and of course an introductory paragraph lauding in past tense the author's earlier work has to be followed by a big "but" - his latest work, the relentlessly self-conscious and domineeringly absurd "Requiem, Mass.," is replete with forced characters, tired clichés, and verbal pyrotechnics that don't bang, but merely whimper. Not to put too fine a point on it.

The story is of a man named Johnny, a writer of some renown who has at the book's outset written the tale of his own life in the guise of a novel. His wife doesn't like the book and confronts him with the idea of telling the truth, urging him to "strip away the pretense" and let Johnny's family be who they were and are so as to tell the truest truth he can about these people he loves. Ostensibly seeing the light, he embarks on writing a memoir instead of a novel: the book "Requiem, Mass."

Much happens (or did) to Johnny, who begins his memoir with the sincere and compelling words "The trouble I want to tell you about began in 1968 when I was twelve." And though the first paragraph is, yes, sincere and compelling, that's about where all sense of self-knowledge ends, and where the only stripping away of pretense occurs.

Immediately we are introduced to the usual suspects, every one of them wacky-for-wacky's-sake: a crazed mom who believes her two children, Johnny and sister Audrey, are aliens who have kidnapped her real children; an absentee dad who's a trucker with at least one other family and who lies with every breath he takes; and peculiar Audrey, a 9-year-old who walks her cat, Deluxe, in a baby stroller, wears huge cowboy boots, and listens to Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys.

But wait. There's more wackiness: the Morrisseys downstairs, named Red, Blackie, Violet, and Garnet; Johnny's first wife, Anne, whose given name she says was Martha but which was actually Mary and which she legally changed to Emma, going by Em for short, while Johnny calls her Alice (with no reason given for any of these monikers); Dad's other wife, Stevie, who lives down in Louisiana and takes pretend pictures of the family by putting her hands to her face as though she's holding a camera and then saying "Smile!" and then, wackily enough, "Click!"; her son, Johnny's half brother Drake, who at 4 hasn't yet spoken and believes he is a dog, rolling over on his back for a belly scratch when he meets the new family.

Beneath that wacky veneer, however, are clichés that are as part and parcel of much modern fiction as are those wacky characters: there's the evil church, Catholic and fundamentalist both, residing at the root of all evil; there's the Vietnam War and its injustices visited upon a generation (the only death in-country we are told of is someone killed by friendly fire; the other Nam-victim death is of a vet who, in a fit of post-traumatic stress disorder, drives his motorcycle into the wall of the Requiem parish church - a kind of martyrization twofer); there's the father as happy narcissist, his own randy desires the only reason he needs to set up house, and break it down, again and again.

If you've read this far into this review, no doubt you are wondering whether there is a story here, whether this "memoir" written by its fictive novelist author in lieu of the novel he has already written about his life (all of it written by novelist Dufresne) has something to say. You're probably wondering whether, as a good memoir will, "Requiem, Mass." reveals something about its author, and his reckoning himself to himself, in this case his role in the breakdown of his entire family, and indeed the death of the entire community in which he grew up (hence, I have to wager, the thin pun of the book's title).

I have to say I think there is a story here, about family and its brittleness and tenacity. The problem is that Dufresne, who in his earlier work was more willing to throw in with story than with linguistic tricks, seems now to have sided with the whirligigs and two-minute sparklers of wacky characters and ready-made villains. It's as though he has allowed the studied pretensions of postmodernism, which hold there is no meta-narrative - no such thing as family - to trump his desire to believe that family actually exists.

I'm with Johnny's wife on this one: I only wish Dufresne would have stripped away as much pretense as possible (for no matter how much he strips, it will always and only be Dufresne telling the story) and given us that story of love, and family, and the ephemeral memories and indelible marks left by both.

Bret Lott teaches at the College of Charleston and is the author, most recently, of the novel "Ancient Highway."