Requiem, Mass.

Each of us has one--a friend who tells such a vivid and inviting story that the narrator and the telling are characters in themselves, and, as if just by listening, we, too, are woven into the passions and losses of the characters. Even as our friend is wild-eyed, spinning deeper and deeper into the story, abandoning now the "facts" and digging into some essential truths about the story and its characters, as detail gives way to hyperbole and our credulity is strained, we keep listening. It's not indulgence--we know others whose stories are long and involved--but with them we yawn and stretch and think about laundry and e-mail. With our storytelling friend, our wild, howling, tempest of a friend, we are rapt. One imagines a hazy Florida night, the air thick with bugs, ice clinking and settling in our glasses, the light changing into shades of mauve. John Dufresne's voice rises over the din of insects and cuts through the suffocating heat. He begins quietly, starting with one protagonist, stripping him away, and bringing in a new one, a first-person narrator that either is Dufresne or a fictionalized Dufresne. In speaking to us, he toys with fact and fiction. Confuses narrator and author. At the end of our wondering which is which--novel that is memoir or fictionalized memoir?--we cease to care. We are too entertained by the warmth and strangeness of his characters and the humor and power with which he is telling the story. And those characters.Requiem, Mass. is full of them. Dozens of them, each inhabiting a life and a universe, some glowing and flaming out within a few pages, and some moving through the story with us. Some are oddballs, some starkly sane, some are genuinely mentally ill. And it's here that Dufresne shows his power--he can write these humorous and wild characters with such warmth and with such a total lack of condescension. They elicit more empathy than ridicule, more delight than horror. Serving as more than just "color," they become the soul and wit of the story--worthy vehicles for this looping and poetic novel. The central force of the novel is Dufresne's narrator, who observes and participates, reflects and responds. As those insects buzz around us in the Florida heat, the ice now melted in our glasses, he is at times quiet and gentle in his requiem, and other times passionate and howling: "Any meaning is better than none. Ask any Catholic or Methodist or Hutterite or Hmong. You believe in a God who, in his exquisite loneliness, created the universe and little you. Or you believe that we, in our terrifying loneliness, created God. Doesn't matter which. Ask any Vietnamese child kneeling in the mud, praying, choking on her tears, feeling the hot muzzle of an M16 at the nape of her neck, hearing the screams of her grandparents, inhaling the sting of smoke and cordite, know that this soldier here behind you dear, his about to make his own meaning by firing a burst of bullets through your head. At that moment there is no arrow

Requiem, Mass. -- besides lending its name to the gimmicky title (which is one of the minor flaws of the novel) -- is a city in Massachusetts where the narrator/protagonist "Johnny" grew up. Requiem, Mass. almost certainly is a stand-in for Worcester, Mass., where the author John Dufresne grew up. The novel has many other indicia of being, at least to a significant extent, autobiographical, but who knows? Perhaps not even John Dufresne knows for sure. The epigraph to the novel is the following from Harold Pinter: "The past is what you remember, imagine you remember, convince yourself you remember, or pretend to remember." The narrator/protagonist is a college professor who lives in Florida (just like the real John Dufresne), and the novel continually shifts back and forth among incidents in the present or very recent past, the intermediate past, and the narrator's childhood in the 1960's in Requiem -- an overwhelmingly Roman Catholic, blue-collar city. What most marked Johnny's youth was his odd family -- a mother whose grasp on reality was tenuous indeed, and who spent some time in a mental hospital; a sister who was devoted to her brother "Johnnyboy," suffered no fools (including the nuns who were her teachers), and unfortunately seemed more than just a little "touched," just like her mother; and a father who was a long-haul trucker (hence home only sporadically) and a good-natured Lothario and down-home philosopher ("Every woman thinks she can change the man she marries. Every man eventually says, You knew what I was like when you married me. Women like projects. Men like the illusion that they are free.") And the dysfunctionality of the family was mirrored, with fun-house variations and distortions, among relatives, the neighbors, and throughout the surrounding community. As in his other novels -- most notably "Louisiana Power & Light" (which is one of my favorite contemporary American novels of the past twenty years) -- Dufresne manages to tell his story of quirky, even freaky, characters experiencing the disappointments, absurdities, and tragedies of life without slipping into despondency or creating a pall over the narrative. To the contrary, Dufresne's narrative is light and compassionate, and laced with humor that is at times gently satirical, other times wittily subversive, and often simply good-natured fun. Perhaps it is that the key to surviving life, in Dufresne's world, is imagination and humor. The novel's thematic preoccupation is with memory and imagination, narrative and truth. Here's one representative passage: "[S]ometimes a writer needs to bend the truth to fit a more efficient and attractive shape. And sometimes the writer finds that he has to flat-out make things up because that's the way he wants or believes his life to have been. So he changes the truth to change the facts because he's trying to make sense of his life, and the life he knows he lives is not always the life his fallible memory recalls.

A unique voice with as quirky a perspective as you are likely to find. I fell in love with John's talented soul way back when and each new offering is more delicious than the one before. "Requiem Mass" may be my favorite because I am from Mass. Or it may be my favorite because I have to underline as I go because the thoughts are too clever and heartbreaking and hilarious to go without some sort of attention. Bravo, John. Long may you write.

Absolutely brilliant, as we can expect from John Dufresne, and to the other two positive reviews, I might add "Me, too! Me, too!" A previous novel of Dufresne's, Deep in the Shade of Paradise, also dealt with memory in an in-depth way, but in "Requiem", he gives us the added gift of a seed of doubt in the narrator's truthfulness, which has the effect of creating a compelling dissonance for the rest of the ride. The final chapter is a speculative conclusion, three years hence, and it is an unexpected device that serves the narrative well. Dufresne's Johnny has grown up with the notion that parallel existences are necessary to achieve happiness, and that notion serves him to the end. John Dufresne first captivated me with "Louisiana Power & Light," leading me to seek out all of his fictional offerings, as I will continue to do for the rest of ever. Ten thumbs up. :-)

Childhood, heartbreak, mental illness, infidelity, roadtrips, hope, tragedy, dysfunction, identity, religion, physics, personal history...you name it and John Dufresne has jammed it into this wise and wistful novel about Johnny, an adolescent struggling to keep his family together. There's comedy too, sure. Readers always remark on Dufresne's sly wit, his ability to create memorable characters living in bizarre circumstances, his chronicling of dark secrets. But Dufresne's humor is more in the tradition of Saul Bellow than Don Rickles: the inevitable result of complex, deep pain -- often self-inflicted -- rather than an overt tickling of your funny bone. And the prose! Man, can Dufresne WRITE. Every page offers rich rewards for those who love inspired, unaffected sentences. Check out this doozy of a passage from page 100: "But I was still writing [...] in the morning, even after I'd changed pens, drunk a pot of coffee, switched ink from black to peacock blue, walked around the block, seen the sunrise, put away the Office Depot tablet and the used the Evidence-brand tablet. So I stopped writing and read an essay on Atlantic salmon by Edward Behr. The author was visiting salmon farms along the Bay of Fundy in New Brunswick. I came to the clause, 'we drove a few minutes along the unspoiled shore,' and I suddenly saw very clearly from his road an unmentioned whitewashed house at the top of a treeless hill overlooking a rocky, wave-tossed cove, and I realized that I had been there, and I knew what Behr did not, that the house, long abandoned by its family, had been converted to a restaurant, and I remembered the dark and rusted interior, the cozy bar, the linen tablecloths on the pine tables in the two small dining rooms, one a step higher than the other, the print of Theodore Rousseau's 'Market in Normandy' over the mantel, a crackling fire in the fireplace, the fragrance of cedar logs." In a few brief strokes, through a balance of carefully chosen details and honest introspection, Dufresne captures everything that this book's about: frustration, storytelling, struggle, imagination, sensory engagement, memory, searching, travel, correcting, connecting, and the quest for comfort. I can't recommend this book enough. When you're finished and have fallen in love with the narrator Johnny (and the author John), I strongly suggest you check out his wonderful short story collection "Johnny Too Bad."