THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1997, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, February 23, 1997 TAG: 9702180457
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY DAVE PATON
LENGTH: 72 lines
LOVE WARPS THE MIND A LITTLE
JOHN DUFRESNE
W.W. Norton. 315 pp. $23.
How does Lafayette Proulx love the women in his life? In this great novel, John Dufresne counts the ways for us. His narrator Lafayette goes to counseling with one, nearly deep-fries his hand thinking of another. And he helps a third battle the cancer that threatens her life.
Dufresne's follow-up to his fine first novel, Louisiana Power and Light, is a major step into the front rank of American writers. Love Warps the Mind a Little is the rare comic novel that manages to address the most serious topics: How will one accept death? And how does one find love, and keep it from ending?
This cancer-novel territory has been charted before, many times - Love Story and Terms of Endearment, among others. And it is as grim and inexorable a place as the killer disease itself. In a way one wishes that ``Laf'' could be let loose in any other environment where he could enjoy himself a little more.
But this is where Dufresne wanted to go, and in the end it's a trip worth taking. His winning humor and intense effort to explore the human of love and life, and death, support each other and elevate his book well above most.
The key to the author's success is Lafayette, a man of bad teeth and good humor who is honest enough to admit that he doesn't have much of a clue about anything. Everyone tells him he's angry at the world, but baffled is a better description. Like his creator, he aspires to sit at the kitchen table and write.
That approach, however, has only gotten him a pile of rejection slips that could wallpaper a house, and now he's getting the biggest one of all - from his wife, Martha. He'd confessed his infidelity after a parish retreat with his pious spouse convinced him that honesty was the way to put the spark back into their marriage.
Instead, she packed his bag, threw him out of their Cape Cod, Mass., apartment, and he and his dog Spot are on their way. Tails between their legs, Laf and dog mope over to to see his girlfriend Judi. They are let in, but not exactly welcome.
She goes to work, Laf stays. He envisions a new fictional couple, Dale and Theresa, and follows them around Southwestern oil lands with his typewriter.
``I write about what I don't know,'' he confides. ``I figure if I know it already, what's the point of writing it?''
Over a bit of time Laf's chances of remaining with Judi seem to improve. He meets her family, even more odd and dysfunctional than his own down in Florida.
He is not the sort who doesn't think about other women, including Martha: How can he not when Judi tells him he should go to marriage counseling? But as Judi enters the far stages of her illness they are close. Maybe Laf's bond with her is just a courtesy, a stop along his way to acknowledge a person worth knowing and worth helping in a time of trouble. Maybe it's love, hard to see until later.
There is a lot of life, and description, packed into Love Warps the Mind a Little. Dufresne writes expansively, but in very short and staccato chapters of only a few pages each. There is also an inviting mess of disorder in Dufresne's characters, but that effect is a product of the author's disciplined work, which is very worthy of its literary publisher, Norton.
Dufresne creates a very rich gallery of people, of home-state settings (``Thank you, Worcester,'' he says in his dedications), of emotions, and finally of thoughts.
This is a book that will loosen, at least for a while, the reader's grip on the steady and solid surfaces that life appears to provide. Love may not be very certain, and life itself can always end. MEMO: Dave Paton is a staff editor.