In the tragicomic mode of his best-selling Louisiana Power & Light, a hilarious and tenderhearted novel about a son's attempts to save his family.
March 10, 2008
In the latest from Dufresne (Love Warps the Mind a Little
) novelist John’s newest manuscript doesn’t impress his girlfriend, Annick, who thinks “it doesn’t breathe.” So he goes back and rewrites it as a memoir: a book within a book. In it, Johnny and Audrey grow up in Requiem, Mass., with their unraveling mother, Frances, who believes her children were replaced by aliens and who bathes in gasoline. Their secretive truck driver father, Rainey, almost certainly has something odd going on down South. The book unfolds like a series of nesting dolls: John meanders around his coastal Florida home, writing his novel, visiting with friends and going on appointments for teaching jobs, while Johnny lives with his mother’s worsening condition, his father’s absences, his mother’s hospitalization and a momentous trip South. Then there are stories within the memoir within the story, including the one a woman tells about her friend, Ginger Rae, who talks of writing a neighbor’s suicide note, then claims it’s part of a story she herself is writing. John is a very amusing unreliable narrator, and Dufresne’s witty, sardonic take on life’s fictions leaps off the page.
May 15, 2008
Dufresne ("Deep in the Shade of Paradise") here offers the childhood reminiscences of Johnny, who is trying to make sense of his traumatic upbringing in Requiem, MA. With a crazy mother who believes her children are imposters; a trucker father whose long, frequent absences have more to do with his secret second family than his delivery route; and a younger sister who likes to sit in closets, Johnny appears to be the only sane one in his family. He struggles none too successfully to instill his home life with some normalcy. As the adult Johnny writes this memoir and tries to make sense of his chaotic past, we get some of his more recent memories as well as a look into his present life. But the slew of other characters that Johnny recalls get tangled up with one another, as one memory triggers another until this reader frequently lost the thread of the main story. Be that as it may, Dufresne's voice is strong and witty, and while the digressions might seem at times extraneous, they are all funny and extremely well told. Recommended for all fiction collections. [See Prepub Alert, "LJ" 3/1/08.]Joy Humphrey, Pepperdine Law Lib., Malibu, CA
Copyright 2008 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
July 1, 2008
Johnnys mentally ill mother, Frances, thinks her children are gone and have been replaced by impostors. Each day, Johnny and his younger sister, Audrey, care for themselves with the help of an assortment of quirky friends and neighbors, including the make-believe family the Sandilands, who offer refuge and respite. Each day, they explain to their mother they really are her children and wait for their father, a long-haul truck driver and habitual liar. Unlike his father, Johnny cant escape the turmoil at home and is determined to hold the center in the small working-class town of Requiem. Johnny intersperses recollections of a tragic and complicated childhood with, what was for a while, a directionless adulthood, as he struggles to maintain relationships with his family and maybe make a life for himself. Dufresnes characters are poignant, their frailties both pitiful and hilarious in this novel of the strong push and pull of family entanglements.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2008, American Library Association.)