Requiem, Mass.: A Novel
by John Dufresne
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Book Summary Information
Author: John DufresneEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2008-07-17
ISBN: 0393057909
Number of pages: 320
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Product features:
- ISBN13: 9780393057904
- Condition: New
- Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!
Book Reviews of Requiem, Mass.: A Novel
Book Review: A literate fugue on memory and imagination, narrative and truth
Summary: 5 Stars
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." Given that, Dufresne observes, "you see the trouble with memoir." Hence, REQUIEM, MASS. is the nearest thing to a memoir we are likely to get from John Dufresne.
REQUEIM, MASS. is not perfect, but it is better than most contemporary novels. I will go further: John Dufresne is one of the country's best literate storytellers currently writing. Somehow I missed whatever publicity there was when REQUIEM, MASS. was released last summer. That paltriness of publicity underscores that John Dufresne is one of our most under-appreciated writers.
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