Book Review: *Requiem, Mass.* by John Dufresne

Requiem, Mass.: A Novel by John Dufresne
Paperback: 330 pages
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; 1 edition (July 6, 2009)
ISBN-13: 978-0393334869

Back-of-the-book blurb: John Dufresne takes us to Requiem, Massachusetts, where Johnny’s mom, Frances, is driving in the breakdown lane once again.  Dad, truck driver and pathalogical liar, is down South somewhere living his secret life.  And little sister Audrey, when she’s not walking her cat Deluxe in a baby stroller, spends her time locked in a closet.  Johnny, meanwhile, is hell-bent on saving the family from itself.

She is Too Fond of Books’ review: Requiem, Mass. had me from the start.  There’s the title, of course; a Requieum Mass is part of a funeral service in which the congregation prays for the peace of the soul of the deceased.  In Dufresne’s novel, Requiem may stand in for the author’s hometown of Worcester; it’s also wonderfully emblematic of the “death” of young Johnny’s family, and his attempts to resuscitate it.  Think of it, there could be an entire series of these:  High, Mass., Low, Mass., Nuptial, Mass., Votive, Mass.; each faux city or town could be populated with Dufresne’s quirky characters and so-extraordinary-it-could-be-true situations.

If the title alone isn’t enough to convince you to pick it up, take a look at the cover photo.  Not only is Prozac symbolically nestled among the kitchen canisters of sugar, flour, and coffee, it also gets the largest container.  Between the double-entrendre title and the clever cover picture, you know this is not going to be a “one big happy family” kind of story.

Johnny narrates the tale, looking back from the present day; or, rather, from three years ahead of the present day.  We find that Johnny is an unreliable narrator, and that is part of his charm.

Not much is as it appears to be in Johnny’s family in Requiem; least of all, the very definition of family.  As his mother, Frances, descends deeper and deeper into a manic state, she claims that Johnny and Audrey are impostors and wonders where her real children are.  Since their father is often on the road and unable to help them, the two children concoct a ruse of staying with friends, and create an entire storyline for this fictional family.  True neighbors, in the apartment below (colorful characters named Red, Violet, Blackie, and Garnet), run interference on behalf of Johnny and Audrey (p 36):

When Audrey and I needed to be out of the house, like when Mom would shake Audrey and scream in her face, the phone would ring, and I’d answer it, tell Mom that Sandilands needed us pronto – they’d decided on the spur of the moment to go dancing at the Club Trocodero.  They’d be out late and we’d need to sleep over. … Earl Sandiland was a captain of industry.  He owned Sandiland Manufacturing, the world’s largest maker of quality dental equipment.  Everyone who knew him called him Captain, including his wife, and he called her his First Mate.

Going to the Sandilands’ usually meant sneaking upstairs to Caeli’s apartment … If Caeli was entertaining a gentleman caller, we stayed downstairs with the Morriseys, Red, Violet, and Blackie.  Red was a retired meter reader for the city water department.  He had a goiter on his neck the size of a cantaloupe and liked to sit out on the front steps listening to the Red Sox broadcast.  In winter, he spent his days ice fishing. …

Dufresne neatly balances the darkness of Frances’ illness with moments of levity.  Neither emotion runs to extremes; I wasn’t sobbing with sorrow or laughing hysterically, simply appreciating a creatively told story.  Sometimes the telling meanders into unexplored alleys or briefly visits characters that we meet only the one time.  I liked that Dufresne wove these seemingly disparate scenes into the overall fabric of Requiem, Mass., these embellishments added to Johnny’s personality and helped the reader to understand what shaped him.

Is Johnny the author, John Dufresne?  Is Requiem really the city of Worcester, Massachusetts?  Dufresne addresses these questions in a note in the Reading Group Guide at the back of the Norton paperback:

I wanted to write a story about two chidren trying to survive their difficult childhoods, and I wanted to play with the forms of fiction and memoir.  Fiction is telling the truth; memoir is telling the facts, and facts are subject to interpretation. … So I hit on the idea of letting Johnny, the narrator, a fiction writer himself, and my alter ego, I suppose, … write a memoir, and I let him know that he could appropriate any of my memories as his own, and no one would be any the wiser.  Johnny writes about how he came to save his family, only to lose them again, and I write about Johnny coming to understand his past and in so doing come to understand my own.  At least a little bit.

About the author:  John Dufresne is the author of several previous novels, including Louisiana Power & Light, Love Warps the Mind a Little, and Deep in the Shades of Paradise.  He is the author of the non-fiction The Lie That Tells a Truth: A Guide to Writing Fiction and the upcoming Is Life Like This?: A Guide to Writing Your First Novel in Six Months (February 2010).  I was quite taken by John Dufresne (and Johnny), and plan to read more of his work.

FTC Disclosure: book was available to subscribers of the publisher’s Reading Group Recommendations newsletter