Southern comforts.

Deep in the Shade
of Paradise
John Dufresne
W. W. Norton, $25.95, 364 pp.

John Dufresne has published three complicated novels set in two complicated worlds, but worlds apart. The middle book, Love Warps the Mind a Little, takes place in Worcester, Massachusetts, where Dufresne was born and raised; the first, Louisiana Power & Light, and now Deep in the Shade of Paradise are both set in and around Monroe, Louisiana (the Southern novels share characters and histories, but each stands alone). All three novels resonate with Dufresne's distinctive voice while fooling around with different narrative forms; all three are funny, inventive, and intermittently outrageous. Love Warps the Mind a Little is far and away my favorite, and certainly part of the reason I prefer it is ultimately geographic: the two novels set in Louisiana share a manic insistence on Southern weirdness. Love Warps the Mind a Little is full of Yankee weirdness, too, but it isn't as cute or as relentless in its idiosyncrasies as the Southern stories. Dufresne anticipates my objection in a funny riff on the grotesque in Southern fiction, but his invocation of Faulkner doesn't get him all the way off the hook.

Like Louisiana Power & Light, Deep in the Shade of Paradise is narrated in the first person plural to emphasize the communal nature of Southern storytelling. Both novels are raucous and meandering, filled with so many bizarre and colorful characters that it's hard to keep track of them all, a difficulty exacerbated by the fact that they nearly all seem to have bizarre and/or colorful names (Boudou, Delano, 6smith--"big 6, little s"). The name thing reaches a novelistic climax when an expectant father imagines naming his unborn child Llwellyn D'Artagnan Loudermilk or Tangerine Sparkle Loudermilk and says the names aloud "like a prayer." That's what I mean by relentless.

Deep in the Shade of Paradise celebrates the wedding of Grisham Loudermilk and Ariane Thevenot in Paradise, the family home in Shiver-de-Freeze, Louisiana. Before vows are exchanged, the groom's cousin, Adlai Birdsong, falls in love with Ariane and attempts to woo her away; the groom goes off on a final fling with a young woman who lives in an Airstream trailer; Adlai's father Royce battles his memories as his Alzheimer's haze thickens. Royce is shepherded around the wedding festivities by his oddly (and colorfully) brilliant eleven-year-old nephew Boudou, last of the fated Fontana family, whose curse was explored in Louisiana Power & Light.

The plot heats up as lovers change partners, but for long stretches, the author pretty much abandons plot for a (usually amusing) digression. This wandering is supposed to mime Southern narration, but I'd say Dufresne overdoes it a tad. He also comments at length on this tendency of his, and in addition to that self-reflectiveness, he pulls plenty more toys and puzzles from his postmod bag o' tricks: a long appendix, complete with folk art, music, Civil War letters, contemporary menus; scenes between the author and his characters; and, best of all, a nod to his editor at Norton, Jill Bialosky. "Every character has a story, and our author's impulse (some would say regrettable impulse) is to let each character have her say, her go at sympathy and redemption. And our job in part (ours and Jill's [Jill his beleaguered and sensible editor]) is to rein in this profligate and self-serving tendency." I suspect that Bialosky has often found Dufresne exasperating but worth it, or maybe I'm just projecting.

He's worth it not just for the funny or the wildly original bits, not simply for the way he revels in the peculiarities of American language, but for the way he goes after the biggest and hardest themes. Dufresne's great subject is death--his first novel explored a family consumed by death, his second a young woman and her lover surprised and even blessed by an early death from cancer. Paradise is heading toward a climactic death too, though the reader doesn't suspect whose till the story is very nearly over. It's not that Dufresne imparts any great intellectual or spiritual wisdom in his lengthy commentaries on death; it's that he imbues death itself with narrative dignity and reverence, and does not even suspend humor to do so. He insists that death guides--or had better guide--our lives. Here's his country songwriter ruminating as she keeps watch at the funeral home: "The essence of a person is beyond the laws of physics. And holding on to that departed essence is our job, is what culture is, what hope is, what defiance is, what love is. What do we owe the dead? Everything."

Dufresne doesn't portray organized religion with much sympathy, but while he's on the subject of death, he returns to religion again and again. A father regards his newborn: "He thought this must have been how Jesus felt about us. And if He did, then His death was no tragedy at all, no sacrifice even. Was pure joy, immaculate love."

Alongside death, Dufresne uses his vast cast of characters and swampy landscape to explore that great Southern subject, memory. Royce's struggles with memory are heartbreaking: "At first you say, Do I really need to know how to turn on the radio? Do I have to remember so-and-so's phone number? I can look it up. But then you don't know where to look it up or why you are or who this person is anyway. The world gets small, and you know at some point it'll squeeze you till you can't breathe." Yet Dufresne's novel is the opposite of a squeeze and the opposite of a heartbreak: it is an expansive and generous celebration of a people and a place. For every frustration, every too-cute line of dialogue, every insistence that Southerners are adorable, he redeems himself with an apt turn, a gorgeous sentence that grants his characters and their dilemmas wit and dignity and hope. He is well worth reading despite and sometimes because of his profligacy, and I imagine it will be worth the wait for the next installment, wherever it takes place.

Valerie Sayers, professor of English at the University of Notre Dame, is the author of five novels set in Due East, South Carolina.