THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, April 21, 1996 TAG: 9604190733
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: BOOK REVIEW
SOURCE: BY JEFFREY H. RICHARDS
LENGTH: Medium: 80 lines
To the author's credit, the African-American characters who appear in John Gregory Brown's new novel do not, as they do in so many books, define themselves in opposition to whites, nor do they dip into the well of stereotypes for their essential representation. Instead, Brown lets his narrator, a 70-year-old artist, tell his story as an artist would, an artist who has traveled the road of hard knocks.
The cultural shaping of the characters in The Wrecked, Blessed Body of Shelton LaFleur develops out of New Orleans in the 1920s and 1930s, but it is a process that grows out of human striving, not ethnicity. Poor Shelton LaFleur - crippled, orphaned and probably just getting by - has needs, desires and fears that seem basic to all people. But mostly, Shelton just wants to know whose child he is.
Brown, author of Decorations in a Ruined Cemetery, has his narrator treat his childhood as if he were talking about another being. During his early years, Shelton is raised by a young, unmarried white woman, Margaret, daughter of Edward Soniat. One day, he goes to a park, climbs a tree, and falls. His body and his life break. Unclaimed by anyone in what he has thought of as his family, Shelton is sent to the Milne Colored Boys Home, a miserable place. Later, our narrator reminds us, Shelton will turn his experiences into art. But right now he is just in pain and confused.
The real story begins when Shelton escapes from the home and is taken in by Minou Parrain, a black sidewalk artist who poses as a blind man to give novelty to his work. In this portion of the narrative, we meet other members of Minou's family, including his mother-in-law, Genevieve, who dies very soon after Shelton arrives. Unfortunately, this shift in Shelton's fortunes comes at a price for readers. With the narrative sustained by Shelton's questions of Minou and of others about his origins and with few answers forthcoming and few characters developed, we are in essence asked to take our pleasure largely in Brown's writing.
Brown maintains for Shelton a lyrical, lightly comic, at times, even elegiac style that soothes and moves us through the thin plot. But that style sags, if one can say that, under its own beauty, the deliberate repetitions of phrasing and thoughts, motifs and narrative conventions that mark Shelton's reflections. This is what an artist does: revisit scenes over and over until the right detail, the right texture emerges that gives the painter or writer the insight needed to finish the piece.
The narrator here, stepping back from Shelton the boy, tells us what painting a given scene will finally become, then replays the scene in the search for nuance. The technique makes for nice paragraphs but at times some desultory chapters.
The slowness of the narrative, however, is confined to the middle. Beginning and end quicken with both writing and story. Shelton's pursuit of his parentage, haphazard though it is, leads him into understanding who all these strangers who have adopted him are - Minou's wife, sister-in-law and daughters; the old white man whose daughter once raised him as her own. Shelton finds strength, even in a broken body, and a talent, painting, when he thought he had none. The excitement, even violence of the final chapters, rushes by in a caress, inviting readers ever so gently to take Shelton's story as their own.
By the end, one can sympathize with the narrator's lament, ``How do I, a tired old man, try to remember this, try to explain a boy's wild imagining, the fierce push and pull of desire, the ache that makes its way like a burrowing animal through every single inch of the body, even one as twisted and wrecked as Shelton's.''
While it lacks some of the impact I had hoped for from the opening chapters, The Wrecked, Blessed Body of Shelton LaFleur treats all its characters with dignity and offers to most some possibility of grace. In a world of insult and bad news, that in itself is a blessing. MEMO: Jeffrey H. Richards is an English professor at Old Dominion University.
by CNB