Deep in the Shade of Paradise (2002)

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In Shiver-de-Freeze, Louisiana (population 375), friends and family have gathered for the impending nuptials of Grisham Loudermilk and Ariane Thevenot. This will be no ordinary wedding—not when Boudou Fontana, the last of the star-crossed Fontana clan, the conjoined twins Tous-les-Doux, and a host of others are involved.

From a writer of rare grace and comic genius comes a "warm, sad, and hilarious ride through the carnival of life" (Dallas Morning News). Rich in character and insight into the vagaries and varieties of love and memory, Deep in the Shade of Paradise is John Dufresne at his funny and thoughtful best.

"A comic opera…tuneful, playful." —New York Times Book Review

Wonderfully imaginative and utterly outrageous....This is a terrific book. -- Chris Offutt, author of Out of the Woods

This, brothers and sisters, is tale-telling that bends time in the direction of beauty. -- Lee K. Abbott, author of Dreams of Distant Lives

[Dufresne] is one of our finest living novelists, and Deep in the Shade... is a masterwork to be treasured. -- Dennis Lehane, author of Mystic River

In his fever-dream novel Deep in the Shade of Paradise, John Dufresne is a goofily, deliriously intrusive authorial presence. He's constantly popping in and declaiming upon his plot and its various themes (which are, incidentally, love and memory and family and Southern cooking.) Toward the end of the book he pronounces, "No characters are minor." This might well be the motto of the book, which is a ridiculously circuitous retelling of A Midsummer's Night Dream, set in deepest Louisiana and cast with literally dozens of cousins. The central story is a love triangle: there's our hero Adlai Birdsong, his cousin Grisham Loudermilk, and Loudermilk's fiancée, Ariane Thevenot. Adlai pursues the beautiful Ariane through plot twists and philosophical digressions, into bars and bedrooms, and finally to the family's old estate where the wedding is to take place. Being a Southern novel, no wedding is complete without a death, and being a Shakespearean exercise, no wedding is complete without a play-within-a-play. Dufresne happily provides all this and more in a novel so completely imagined that in the back, there's an appendix like a capacious satchel, made to hold "items of passing interest." --Claire Dederer