Honestly, I picked this novel up at our local Goodwill for $3.99 only because it had the word "Louisiana" in the title. I'm collecting all things pertaining to Louisiana for my Louisiana guest bedroom.

It was written by a creative writing professor in Florida, with short chapters, so you can catch a quick read here and there. That's about the only good thing about this book. The subject itself was rather boring. It gets a 2 star because there's not a lot going on. This book heads back to my local Goodwill.

The setting is suppose to be Monroe, Louisiana, but you never get that feel. No accents, no southern scenaries, no nothing. The story centers around one main character, Billy Wayne Fontana, who followed his heart for love and left the priesthood before he was actually certified. He was searching for meaning and purpose in his life, but he never felt "fulfilled", which we all may experience in life from time-to-time, especially when we turn our back on God. Unfortunately, I never did develop feelings for any of the characters. This read brought no emotions out what-so-ever! No action really until the very last couple of short chapters where the last 3 Fontana men died.

But, of course, there's another Fontana in the near future because of his lusty feelings. The town people would still believe in the Fontana curse. God fearing people would believe it was all the bad decisions Billy Wayne made by following after lust instead of his heart. The scientists believe a genetic defect in their genes. Then there are those that believe the Fontanas were deposited there in Monroe, Louisiana by space aliens from Venus.

Unfortunately, the book doesn't really go into the Fontana's ancestral history. He just drops a few lines here and there in random odd spots in the story. So you don't even get a real good feeling or any ideas about Billy Wayne's earlier ancestry...just surface stuff....to even know why their is a cyrse on the Fontana name. ( )

Loved this book, tore through it in about two and half days. That's fast, for me. I notice a lot of reviews by readers (not professionals, that is) seem to think Dufresne is disparaging his characters. Mocking them, one said. I don't see that at all. I wouldn't have finished it, let alone loved it, if I thought that were the case. The book, for me, is about how hard it is to find your way in life, your direction. Do you have a destiny? Are you under a curse? How much is under your power anyway? I thought it was a humble, sometimes funny, look at the human condition. Southern literature tends to take the "our whole damn family is cursed" approach, and for years I avoided this book, despite its reputation, because it sounded like just another Faulkner wanna-be. One reading of Sound and Fury back in high school was enough for me. I've read that story, no interest in reading it again by someone else. But I believe Dufresne is looking at this phenomenon and holding it up to the light. To use the title of his new book on writing, he asks "Is this the way life is?"

This book has me re-thinking my position on mainstream fiction. Though I still don't know why the form always seems to include violent death(s).

Anyway, the author isn't laughing at us. He's laughing with us. Perhaps he's not truly a "Southern" writer. Since he's from Massachusetts, I guess he's disqualified, in the minds of some. But I don't know if that's even the point. It's just a blurb on the back of the book to help the potential buyer pigeonhole the book before him. Marketing, that's all. Pay no mind. ( )

I ended up liking this book a lot, even though I didn't think I would. The back of my edition hails Dufresne as the next Flannery O'Connor and the next William Faulkner, which is great, but... first of all, dude is about as southern as my right foot, and second of all, he's... not. It's not to say he's not a good writer, because I think he is. It's not a question of not being in the same league (though he may well not be; they're not among my favorite writers, so my basis for comparison is lacking) but of the fact that, while Dufrense writes about the south here, he's doing it in a vastly different way. Specifically, he's mocking what he writes about, and in a not terribly subtle way, that I don't think either Faulkner or O'Connor was particularly given to. Dufresne himself freely admits to being an outsider looking in on the world he's created; so it's not clear to me whether the critics quoted are ignorant or just dumb. Either way, their effusive praise set my teeth on edge and prepared me for a novel I was going to hate.

Louisiana Power and Light is a vast, sprawling, ambitious novel. The story is told by a chatty narrator who is clearly of the landscape of Dufresne's Monroe, but whose identity is never established. This narrator pieces together what are supposed to be bits of local history and eyewitness accounts of things in order to tell the hilariously tragic story of the last of the Fontanas, the requisite family of backward redneck inbred southern swamp-dwellin' weirdos that Monroe both does and doesn't want to be quit of. As in all southern stories, there is god and sex and death and bad omens; like all small town stories, everyone is up in each others' business all of the time. This is not an easy read - the plot and storytelling are complex enough that you have to pay attention even when it seems like the narrator's rambling along meaninglessly, and there are a lot of characters to keep track of - but it's weird and fun and well-put-together. ( )