Requiem, Mass. by John Dufresne

From the Publisher

John Dufresne takes us to Requiem, Mass., heart of the Commonwealth, where Johnny's mom, Frances, is driving in the breakdown lane once again. She thinks Johnny and his little sister Audrey have been replaced by aliens; she's sure of it, and she's pretty certain that she herself is already dead, or she wouldn't need to cover the stink of her rotting flesh with Jean Naté Après Bain. Dad, truck driver and pathological liar, is down South somewhere living his secret life. And Audrey, when she's not walking her cat Deluxe in a baby stroller, spends her time locked in a closet telling herself stories. Johnny, meanwhile, is hell-bent on saving the family from itself.

In his "truly original voice" (Miami Herald) and with the "miraculous beauty of his tale-telling" (New York Times Book Review), Dufresne brings his unparalleled eye for the tragic and the absurd to the dysfunctions and joys of family in this powerful new novel.

Publishers Weekly

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. (July)

Joy Humphrey - Library Journal

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, LJ3/1/08.]

Kirkus Reviews

Dufresne (Johnny Too Bad, 2005, etc.) travels to Requiem, Mass. The characters here are way beyond quirk-on a good day they might aspire to be wildly eccentric. The novel introduces us to a dysfunctional family (a redundant phrase in modern culture?) at whose center is "Mom," a woman who "[rolls] up her bologna into a tube and [eats] it like a cannoli, the ketchup dripping down her chin . . . " Her erratic gastronomic behavior is a symptom of her growing paranoia, which eventually becomes so bad she even denies the possibility that her children, Audrey and Johnny (the latter is the novel's narrator), can actually be hers (" ‘If they were my kids, I'd love them, wouldn't I?' "). Her increasingly bizarre deportment includes extinguishing her cigarettes in her mashed potatoes and looking around at her family and asking, " ‘Who are you people?' " Incredibly, the tone of all this is rather lighthearted, even frivolous at times. Rainy, Audrey and Johnny's father is a long-haul truck driver who cheerfully wills himself to stay away from home for weeks at a time-we soon find out that he has several other families cached away in various parts of the country. After being sent to a halfway house, Mom establishes a simulacrum of a "normal" life, at least insofar as she can with a bigamous husband and a couple of whacko children. Dufresne fills this novel with plenty of postmodern references; the writing itself is as much a subject as the oddball family.

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