From a critically acclaimed novelist comes a masterful memoir in the tradition of Edmund White's A Boy's Own Story David Plante was born and brought up in a French-speaking Catholic parish in Providence, Rhode Island, that was like an isolated fortress in Yankee New England. The nuns of the parish school wore long black veils and taught the children that they lived in le petit Canada, where they preserved the beliefs of le grand Canada, a country of suffering eased by miracles. This invisible country--with its history of ...
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From a critically acclaimed novelist comes a masterful memoir in the tradition of Edmund White's A Boy's Own Story David Plante was born and brought up in a French-speaking Catholic parish in Providence, Rhode Island, that was like an isolated fortress in Yankee New England. The nuns of the parish school wore long black veils and taught the children that they lived in le petit Canada, where they preserved the beliefs of le grand Canada, a country of suffering eased by miracles. This invisible country--with its history of long lost French North America, of the Jesuit missionaries devoted to converting the Indians, of the hard lives of fur traders and woodsmen and the Indian squaws who became their wives--was made more present to him than the visible country he lived in. His part-Blackfoot father was stoic and silent, his mother lively and garrulous but trapped, and at the center of their difficult lives was a deep, dark God. The ghosts of the parish haunted David Plante long after he left home, lost his belief in any god, and found the center of his life both in love and in writing. However free of his past he became in his maturity, his constant fear remained that the God he was brought up with would appear to him and possess him. Finally, Plante came to terms with this possessive God by coming to terms with his ancestry--a stunning spiritual and physical journey that brings him back to Providence, to Canada, to France, and finally to a new understanding of God.
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David Plante here sums up a lifetime of writing, and examines the elements of a life that it takes to do so: those close and far shadows and lights that are family, lovers, friends, and....ghosts. But his eye is so true, and his memory so deep (anyone who has read the Francoeur Trilogy will especially love this memoir) that he reveals these things with complete openness. Though philosophically rich, Plante's text is never without three-dimensionality; one can see and hear his characters, as they parade through his thoughts as points of reference. His subject always is the search for self and identity; yet that identity is always followed by the shadows -- the ghosts -- of heritage and tradition; ceremony and simple acts of living. The mundane is as erotic as the sacred: faith is unexplainable, as is love. Things which pass us, and then pass away from us cannot ever be defined. They can be called back; they can be named; they can be desired. They can never last. This beautiful memoir is a wonderful capstone to an author who has never written the same book twice, but has eagerly sought out the same foundations of the heart to retell it with new insights. It is a book about a writer, and it is a book about the act of living as one. And it is extraordinary.
