Requiem, Mass.: A Novel [Hardcover]

John Dufresne (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 17, 2008

In the tragicomic mode of his best-selling Louisiana Power & Light, a hilarious and tenderhearted novel about a son's attempts to save his family.

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 She thinks Johnny and his little sister Audrey have been replaced by aliens; she's sure of it, and she's pretty certain that she herself is already dead, or she wouldn't need to cover the stink of her rotting flesh with Jean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.

Editorial Reviews

From 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)
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From Booklist

Sheers cleverly rewrites history in a fascinating and chilling story of World War II England—a meditation on conflicted loyalties that posits Russia’s fall and a failed D-Day invasion. Partially occupied by the German army, Britain has seen the unthinkable flight of Winston Churchill to Canada, leaving only pockets of underground resistance, told they have approximately two weeks of survival time to repel or impede the Nazi invasion. The women of a Welsh farming village awaken one day to find the men have vanished. Ignorant of the existence of underground cells because of their isolation and the men’s secrecy, they can only cope, wait, and hope. Two months pass, winter arrives and, with it, a German patrol with a communications radio. Some women see only the enemy, but one sees the small invading force as one that “might just keep them all alive.” She accepts work for them in exchange for supplies. Others capitulate. Is it collaboration to let the Nazis tend their livestock in the bitter cold? Treason? What would you do? --Whitney Scott

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company (July 17, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393057909
• ISBN-13: 978-0393057904
• Product Dimensions: 5.9 x 1.1 x 8.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,591,992 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Amen July 5, 2008

By Voice of Chunk

Format:Hardcover

Childhood, heartbreak, mental illness, infidelity, roadtrips, hope, tragedy, dysfunction, identity, religion, physics, personal history...you name it and John Dufresne has jammed it into this wise and wistful novel about Johnny, an adolescent struggling to keep his family together. There's comedy too, sure. Readers always remark on Dufresne's sly wit, his ability to create memorable characters living in bizarre circumstances, his chronicling of dark secrets. But Dufresne's humor is more in the tradition of Saul Bellow than Don Rickles: the inevitable result of complex, deep pain -- often self-inflicted -- rather than an overt tickling of your funny bone.

And the prose! Man, can Dufresne WRITE. Every page offers rich rewards for those who love inspired, unaffected sentences. Check out this doozy of a passage from page 100:

"But I was still writing [...] in the morning, even after I'd changed pens, drunk a pot of coffee, switched ink from black to peacock blue, walked around the block, seen the sunrise, put away the Office Depot tablet and the used the Evidence-brand tablet. So I stopped writing and read an essay on Atlantic salmon by Edward Behr. The author was visiting salmon farms along the Bay of Fundy in New Brunswick.... I came to the clause, 'we drove a few minutes along the unspoiled shore,' and I suddenly saw very clearly from his road an unmentioned whitewashed house at the top of a treeless hill overlooking a rocky, wave-tossed cove, and I realized that I had been there, and I knew what Behr did not, that the house, long abandoned by its family, had been converted to a restaurant, and I remembered the dark and rusted interior, the cozy bar, the linen tablecloths on the pine tables in the two small dining rooms, one a step higher than the other, the print of Theodore Rousseau's 'Market in Normandy' over the mantel, a crackling fire in the fireplace, the fragrance of cedar logs."

In a few brief strokes, through a balance of carefully chosen details and honest introspection, Dufresne captures everything that this book's about: frustration, storytelling, struggle, imagination, sensory engagement, memory, searching, travel, correcting, connecting, and the quest for comfort.

I can't recommend this book enough. When you're finished and have fallen in love with the narrator Johnny (and the author John), I strongly suggest you check out his wonderful short story collection "Johnny Too Bad." Read more ›

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant, and unsettling. July 12, 2008

By L. Winchester

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

Absolutely brilliant, as we can expect from John Dufresne, and to the other two positive reviews, I might add "Me, too! Me, too!"

A previous novel of Dufresne's, Deep in the Shade of Paradise, also dealt with memory in an in-depth way, but in "Requiem", he gives us the added gift of a seed of doubt in the narrator's truthfulness, which has the effect of creating a compelling dissonance for the rest of the ride. The final chapter is a speculative conclusion, three years hence, and it is an unexpected device that serves the narrative well. Dufresne's Johnny has grown up with the notion that parallel existences are necessary to achieve happiness, and that notion serves him to the end.

John Dufresne first captivated me with "Louisiana Power & Light," leading me to seek out all of his fictional offerings, as I will continue to do for the rest of ever. Ten thumbs up. :-)

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Wonderful creative writing - colorful, developed characters - fast moving... September 2, 2008

By Living thru the Pages

Format:Hardcover

... all of this makes for a great book - one that the author's thoughts and characters will pop up many times in my thoughts in the future.

After reading this book I went of a John Dufresne quest and located
"Love Warps the Mind a Little"

I liked it even better, and once again - was sad to see the end - and will miss all of the characters.

Dufresne has a great imagination - and if he isn't making up most of the descriptions of the characters - I just may have to stay in my room and do all of my "daily activities" thru the Internet and never leave home again!

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars Too sad to be funny October 27, 2010

By HB

Format:Paperback

John Dufresne has always been a master of riding the fine between tragically sad and hilariously funny. This is the first work I've read of his where he fails to straddle that line. Two children growing up with a psychotic mother who thinks her kids have been replaced with replicas might be funny, but the fact that these two children struggle to raise themselves throughout the book, well, it's just too darned sad. Or at least the fact that we see the world through the boy's narrative lens, and HE doesn't see the humor in it, makes the book--well, a chore.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A literate fugue on memory and imagination, narrative and truth April 21, 2009

By R. M. Peterson TOP 1000 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

Requiem, Mass. -- besides lending its name to the gimmicky title (which is one of the minor flaws of the novel) -- is a city in Massachusetts where the narrator/protagonist "Johnny" grew up. Requiem, Mass. almost certainly is a stand-in for Worcester, Mass., where the author John Dufresne grew up. The novel has many other indicia of being, at least to a significant extent, autobiographical, but who knows? Perhaps not even John Dufresne knows for sure. The epigraph to the novel is the following from Harold Pinter: "The past is what you remember, imagine you remember, convince yourself you remember, or pretend to remember."

The narrator/protagonist is a college professor who lives in Florida (just like the real John Dufresne), and the novel continually shifts back and forth among incidents in the present or very recent past, the intermediate past, and the narrator's childhood in the 1960's in Requiem -- an overwhelmingly Roman Catholic, blue-collar city. What most marked Johnny's youth was his odd family -- a mother whose grasp on reality was tenuous indeed, and who spent some time in a mental hospital; a sister who was devoted to her brother "Johnnyboy," suffered no fools (including the nuns who were her teachers), and unfortunately seemed more than just a little "touched," just like her mother; and a father who was a long-haul trucker and a good-natured Lothario and down-home philosopher ("Every woman thinks she can change the man she marries. Every man eventually says, You knew what I was like when you married me. Women like projects. Men like the illusion that they are free.") And the dysfunctionality of the family was mirrored, with fun-house variations and distortions, among relatives, the neighbors, and throughout the surrounding community....

As in his other novels -- most notably "Louisiana Power & Light" (which is one of my favorite contemporary American novels of the past twenty years) -- Dufresne manages to tell his story of quirky, even freaky, characters experiencing the disappointments, absurdities, and tragedies of life without slipping into despondency or creating a pall over the narrative. To the contrary, Dufresne's narrative is light and compassionate, and laced with humor that is at times gently satirical, other times wittily subversive, and often simply good-natured fun. Perhaps it is that the key to surviving life, in Dufresne's world, is imagination and humor.

The novel's thematic preoccupation is with memory and imagination, narrative and truth. Here's one representative passage: "[S]ometimes a writer needs to bend the truth to fit a more efficient and attractive shape. And sometimes the writer finds that he has to flat-out make things up because that's the way he wants or believes his life to have been. So he changes the truth to change the facts because he's trying to make sense of his life, and the life he knows he lives is not always the life his fallible memory recalls." Given that, Dufresne observes, "you see the trouble with memoir." Hence, REQUIEM, MASS. is the nearest thing to a memoir we are likely to get from John Dufresne.

REQUEIM, MASS. is not perfect, but it is better than most contemporary novels. I will go further: John Dufresne is one of the country's best literate storytellers currently writing. Somehow I missed whatever publicity there was when REQUIEM, MASS. was released last summer. That paltriness of publicity underscores that John Dufresne is one of our most under-appreciated writers. Read more ›