THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, August 21, 1994 TAG: 9408230629
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY DAVE PATON
LENGTH: Medium: 91 lines
LOUISIANA POWER & LIGHT
JOHN DUFRESNE
W.W. Norton & Co. 306 pp. $22.
Electricity courses through the high-tension lines of Louisiana Power & Light in and around the town of Monroe, La. The current brings illumination and the means of powering the people's livelihoods and comforts. But underneath the lines, scenes of blight and death are cropping up - sickened cattle, blasted crops, deformed fish.
The question arises: Is it because of the lines?
A company spokesman - one other than its mascot, Reddy Kilowatt - answers the charge to a TV reporter.
Electricity needs a conductor, he says. It doesn't tumble from the lines. No, this is not a matter of electricity. My guess is that it's a matter of husbandry.
John Dufresne's powerful tragicomic novel, Louisiana Power & Light, is indeed a matter of husbandry - specifically that of Billy Wayne Fontana, the sole survivor of a clan that has achieved legend through its very sorriness.
Since the web-fingered family patriarch Peregrine turned up in northeast Louisiana about 1840 and fathered a pair of albino twins, the townsfolk's own history has been defined and carried down through the vehicle of Fontana-watching. At the library's Great Books meetings, people tell the Fontana tales.
The clan sires only males, never a female. It disappeared into the bayous once for 40 years looking for its Promised Land, the men wearing an odd sort of mosquito hood that may or may not have inspired the Ku Klux Klan headgear.
The Fontanas took a back seat to no family in their number of executed criminals and yellow-fever victims. One of its scions rammed a plane into a seed-oil tank, creating a deadly tidal wave of cottonseed oil down Monroe's main street.
Between those misfortunes and the flood of '27, only one Fontana made it into the post-World War II years: Billy Wayne, son of a lunatic who died shortly thereafter.
Hoping to draw an end to the Fontana line, the townspeople hit upon the idea of sending the orphaned Billy Wayne into the priesthood. He is sent to the Sisters of St. Francis to work, study and hopefully take his vows, especially that of chastity.
But Billy Wayne, who is indeed an upright, honest, sensitive soul - no depraved criminal or mental defective - falls from the priestly path into the arms of Earlene deBastrop, a patient at the Sisters' hospital who asks the novitiate for confession. They run away and marry, then nearly divorce. The first products of their nuptial bed are only misunderstanding and confusion.
Billy Wayne gets a job exterminating pests. He and some buddies also get embroiled in the defense of a Pakistani motel owner who welcomed Billy Wayne and Earlene to a honeymoon room, threw them a wedding party, then stabbed a redneck politician in the arm with an oyster knife at the party.
Earlene writes country songs in a notebook. She struggles to understand her husband, so burdened with the weight of his family history. The couple gropes toward the difficult matter of procreation, which they seem unable to pull off.
Dufresne's characters are not a bunch of low-slung bayou rats. Even his seedy lawyers, taxi drivers and ex-cons listen to Charlie Parker and wax philosophical over the meaning of things.
So it's in perfect tone for this bittersweet novel, Dufresne's first, when Earlene says of Billy Wayne's job and their failed attempts at conception:
``It might be the killing you do that's the fault. We choose our metaphors according to how we want to live, even if we don't know it. You ought to be generating power if you want to make babies.''
Billy Wayne goes down to Louisiana Power & Light, applies, and gets hired. The rest of the novel spins out as a tug between light and life on the one hand, and darkness and death on the other. Can Billy Wayne fight off the downward tug of being a Fontana? Will he succeed in making a son, and what sort of success would that even be?
It's a ride worth taking, and Dufresne, a native of Worcester, Mass., who teaches creative writing at Florida International University in Miami, is a first-rate driver. He is a profound, comical Southern writer staking a claim to the territory once inhabited most significantly by Flannery O'Connor, though he works in a bit less realistic, more playful vein.
Like the region he chronicles, Dufresne recalls those who came before. It's fine that he's here now. MEMO: Dave Paton is a staff editor. ILLUSTRATION: Photo
CINDY CHINELLY
John Dufresne explores the crushing power of family history in his
tragicomic first novel, ``Louisiana Power & Light.''
by CNB