A Density of Souls
by Christopher Rice
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Talk Miramax Books, Myperion (New York): 23 August 2000. Hardcover: 288 pages. ISBN-10: 0-7868-6646-2 ISBN-13: 978-0786866465 Suggested retail price: $23.95 (US) Tags: alcohol; cemeteries; hate crimes; high schools; homosexuality; hurricanes; Mainstream; mental institutions; murder; Mystery; New Orleans; suicide Tactical strength: [5/10] |
This first novel by Christopher Rice, son of poet Stan Rice and vampire chronicler Anne Rice, starts with four New Orleans teenagers -- Greg, Brandon, Stephen, and Meridith -- as they enter high school. Before high school, these four were inseparable, but the once inseparable friends find that high school sports and peer pressure split them apart. Greg and Brandon join the football team, Meridith joins the cheerleaders, and Stephen joins the drama club. By their sophomore year, Brandon and Greg have completely ostracized Stephen, labeling him a fag. Greg and Meridith have started dating, and he begins to hit her. And Stephen has his first satisfying homosexual experience. At a critical football game, Brandon assaults a fellow player nearly breaking the boy's neck, and Greg's little brother, Alex, gets killed by a garbage truck just outside the football stadium. Following the tragedy, Greg's father commits Greg's mother to a mental institution, Greg commits suicide, and Brandon gets sent to a military camp for boys. Although the town accepts Greg's death as a suicide, Rice implies that Stephen might have murdered Greg.
The story then jumps ahead four years, but the characters really don't seem to have matured. Brandon has disappeared from the military camp, Meredith nearly dies from alcohol poisoning, and Stephen spends his spare time in gay bars looking for Mr. Right. Rice seems to emphasize the point that a tragedy in a person's adolescence stops social development until he or she can somehow -- if ever -- break through the psychological aspects of that tragedy. He also implies that just about everyone has these tragedies that become the basis of adult motivation. Most of the parents Rice depicts still suffer from psychological injuries suffered long before they married or had children.
So here in the middle of the plot, Rice introduces a new main character, Jordan -- Brandon's older brother. Jordan arrives in New Orleans with the intention of solving the mystery of his brother's disappearance, but he finds that his brother's story depends on the intertwining stories of Greg, Meredith, and Stephen. In most investigative fiction, we meet the investigator early on, so I found the late introduction of Jordan distracting. Rice also describes Jordan as so perfect that he appears weird to others. He had a perfect childhood, lead the football team to several championships, and never had an psychological trauma -- at least until now. His girlfriend points out that everyone else has various issues, and Jordan has no way to relate to other people. Jordan interviews Brandon's old friends, and we start to learn that a lot more happened between the boys before high school than just sports and pranks. I found the ending a bit cliched when Jordan starts putting all the pieces together and must confront his brother in the middle of a hurricane that floods their neighborhood with feet of rushing water. You see that Rice wants the hurricane to provide a symbolic representation of the characters' internal turmoil, but instead the hurricane seems to provide the tension that Rice could not produce with the characters on their own.
Even though I had some problems with the construction of A Density of Souls, I found the plot reasonably well formed for a first novel. The story keeps you reading because you find the characters interesting although ultimately underdeveloped. The flat characters follows along with Rice's theme of psychological trauma causing social stagnation, but Rice implies that this sort of tragic life has its origins in the social structures of New Orleans. While Rice provides a microscopic portrait of upper-class New Orleans, he doesn't do as good a job of dealing with the lives in southern private high school as Chris Fuhrman does in The Dangerous Lives of Alter Boys, but since Fuhrman has died, we'll just have to settle for Rice. His second novel, The Snow Garden shows significant improvement in both character development and plot construction.
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