Chilly Depths

By Paul Gray

by David Plante

Atheneum; 159 pages; $9.95

Grief is often most eloquent when understated. Author David Plante's seventh novel is a textbook example of such successful reticence. Its narrator, Daniel Francoeur, is a writer living in London; he pays three visits to his aging parents in Providence, the last of them on the occasion of his father's funeral. Standing beside the coffin with his six brothers, Daniel finds himself weeping: "Then, with a little jolt, I felt that I was being dramatic, and my sobbing stopped."

Such self-control dominates The Country. Plante is a minimalist with language; his prose reduces events to small, discrete moments. He uses words less to evoke a scene than to catalogue it: "The sun was beaming through the pantry window into the kitchen; there was a block of yellow light on the wall above the table, set for supper with mismatched plates, glasses, a loaf of bread and a carton of milk. It was five-thirty."

This flat style may look easy, but what Plante accomplishes with it is not. Beneath the thin ice of Daniel's taciturnity, dark and chilly depths are clearly visible. When they get together, members of the Francoeur family step very gingerly. The phrases "How are you?" and "Are you all right?" become refrains: not just the words people normally say when they have not seen one another for some time, but utterances intended to forestall confessions of private turmoil and pain. Only the parents, in their increasing mental and physical deterioration, are exempt from this iron rule of politeness. During Daniel's first visit, his mother suddenly turns on her husband: "You wouldn't let me have the operation, though the doctor said I should, said I'd die if I had another baby. I had seven sons. You kept me in this house with the children, you still keep me in it, you've had your will." Later, the father bursts into tears and says, "I have done no good, none to your mother, none to you boys ... I have done no good in the world."

Little is offered to ameliorate these spasms of despair. Daniel questions his father about the old man's grandparents, a French-Canadian fur trader and a Blackfoot Indian woman. But seeking his heritage only makes the son realize how much of it has been lost. Seeing unknown relatives at his father's wake, Daniel muses: "For me, they brought with them a crude air as of a settlement in the woods of people of strange blood, a settlement which was not really a success." Reconstructing a gathering his family had held some 20 years earlier, he recalls a tableau: his father depressed, his mother on the verge of hysteria. Even the Francoeurs' idea of Catholicism cannot comfort: "It was a religion, not of recourse, but stark truth: death is what we live for, and as terrible as it is, to die is better than to live."

In spite of everything, the brothers love each other and their parents. They decide that their late father, a machinist, was "a great man" and take comfort from this belief. One says: "We're all separated, we brothers, and hardly know what one another is doing, and yet that doesn't matter, because we know one another in a bigger way, which keeps us together. Isn't that so?" Daniel answers, "Yes." And this stark, moving novel echoes that affirmative. --By Paul Gray

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