|
David Plante is a good writer. He descends from Hemingway and writes a high American plain style with a personality all its own. In his memoir American Ghosts, he quotes a passage from Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon, and his prose stands up to it. Plante’s sentences bore in, so he is adept at letting you imagine what is happening between two persons or at describing the claustrophobic world of the Providence French-Canadian parish in which he grew up. Some 20 or more years ago, Plante, who is best known as a novelist and the author of the "Francœur" trilogy, published a memoir titled Three Difficult Women. These portraits of his relationships with the novelist Jean Rhys, the editor Sonia Orwell (widow of George Orwell), and Germaine Greer were bold in a raw, unsparing way and seemed the work of a truth teller. George Orwell once said that most autobiographies were partial at best because they left out the writer’s embarrassments and humiliations. In his earlier book, Plante did not stint on those of his subjects, and neither does he ignore his own humiliations in American Ghosts. It is a book about the struggles of a lapsed Catholic to believe and of a man raised in a French-speaking world cut off from the rest of America to claim his ancestry. It is also much more. The first 76 pages of American Ghosts haunt this book. In them, Plante describes the world of his childhood, a world symbolized by his mother’s restless walking from room to room in the Plante home, stopping to beat her hands against walls and doors so great was her desire to get out. She had internalized the parish, and she was like Plante himself, his six brothers, and his silent father, one of the "invisible," a Canuck in America but not of it. In his quiet, intense way, Plante creates a world so separate from the rest of Providence that when he leaves it to go to college in Boston and then for Europe, there is no way he can truly leave it. (There is a beautiful story about his mother’s buying a winter coat in a downtown Providence store that illuminates the class and culture lines that Plante’s mother and father did not cross.) In Europe, Spain to be precise, Plante is initiated into sex and love. Again, the episode is simply but beautifully and erotically present, so the reader is there with the young Plante. This memoir does not feel like "now" and "then," and the reason must be the consistency of Plante’s character. He does come to terms with his past and his faith — the book ends with a prayer to a God he doesn’t believe in, the only God he can pray to — but so formed was Plante by his childhood that he never breaks free, never transforms himself into someone whose ghosts have been laid to rest. That he does come to terms at all is by virtue of the love of his "life partner," the Greek-born-and-reared British publisher Nikos Stangos (their first meeting shows Plante’s gift for creating a scene as if the rest of the world did not exist), his discovery of a Plante family tree, and the insistence of his friend the novelist Mary Gordon that he return to the parish. This is not a version of you can’t go home. Instead, Plante the novelist imagines both what is invisible in his past, the ghosts of Canucks whose lives he now invents, and what is right in front of him, the facts of life like "the pillow on the unmade bed," the book’s last line. In some profound way, American Ghosts is a book that only a writer who grew up in America speaking another language, living in a culture defined by the Church, and determined to remain isolated from American life could write. By profound, I mean that Plante gives us a vision that will be familiar to many immigrants and "aliens" in America while he writes of the ghosts in all our pasts. America is, as William Carlos Williams wrote in his poem that begins "The pure products of America/go crazy," without "peasant traditions." Plante’s family lacked one, and so did my own. Mine came from Hungary on one side and Germany on the other. They were certainly not "white niggers," as Plante calls his Canucks, but they too brought no past. Today, I could not trace either side beyond its first appearance in this new world around the turn of the 20th century. Ghosts haunt us all, and we Americans are all humbled, as is Plante, by our contradictions if we but see them. Plante is a writer who won’t let you avert your eyes. |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Issue Date: March 18 - 24, 2005 Back to the Books table of contents |
Sponsor Links | |||
---|---|---|---|
© 2000 - 2006 Phoenix Media Communications Group |