DECORATIONS IN A RUINED CEMETERY

John Gregory Brown's luminous first novel takes on the enduring themes of great Southern fiction - family, race, and faith - in a heartbreaking tale of identity, devotion, and regret. At its rich emotional center is the Eagen family of New Orleans, Irish Catholics of "mixed blood" in a city where race defines destiny.
The mesmerizing story begins with the collapse of a bridge and its consequences for Thomas Eagen, a troubled young doctor whose unforeseen journey still haunts his daughter, Meredith, years later. Still puzzling over her father's abrupt decision to leave his wife, the stepmother she had grown to love, Meredith ponders the questions that blinded Thomas to his children's needs. Why did his mother, a proud black woman, abandon his devout Catholic father, and why did Thomas's own marriage fail?
The elusive answers to these questions lie for Meredith in the fateful return of the black handyman who holds in his memory the full story of the family's past. Through his clear-eyed account and her stepmother's tender letters, Meredith begins to unravel the misunderstandings that led them all, long ago, to tragedy.
John Gregory Brown travels through this fertile Southern landscape with resonating grace, humor, and compassion, shedding light on the virtues and dangers of family loyalty and the power and limitations of faith. In praise of Decorations in a Ruined Cemetery, Lee Smith described this novel as "shot through with love that transcends time and race." It introduces a writer of rare sensibility and accomplishment.

Brown attempts no less a task than to unravel the mystery of race in this well-crafted and moving first novel. One morning in 1965, Dr. Thomas Eagen, who is white, and Lowell and Meredith, his 12-year-old children by his dead first wife, drive away, leaving his second wife, Catherine, and their New Orleans home. But as the trio crosses Lake Pontchartrain, a portion of the causeway bridge collapses; the only casualty is Murphy Warrington, a black man who used to work for Dr. Eagen's father. After being fished from the river, Murphy becomes the catalyst for a series of revelations about Thomas's light-skinned black mother and the reasons she abandoned her husband and son when Thomas was an infant. The story is told partly by a now-adult Meredith, partly via letters from her stepmother Catherine, and partly by the injured Murphy. Brown deftly narrates his novel from various perspectives, making cogent observations about race. But the topic may be too large for this essentially slight, albeit engrossing, story of everyday betrayal.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A likable, generally well-written first novel that never quite convinces us of ``the sad, complicated workings of this world.'' It wears its sorrow heavily and tries to achieve a Faulknerian pitch with its dark tale of miscegenation, but there's something unearned about all the joylessness. Meredith Egan, in her mid-30's, here recalls a painful time in her life when she was 12 and her father, Thomas, grabbed her and her twin brother, Lowell, and abandoned his current wife, Cathy. Leaving Cathy behind in New Orleans, Thomas heads for his father's old house in the country but must turn around when a bridge across Lake Pontchartrain collapses in front of them. Instead, he takes his children to live on the top floors of his office in the black section of New Orleans. Born of a light-skinned Negro mother and an Irish immigrant father, Thomas has never come to terms with his mixed blood. His medical practice serves mostly those who can't pay, and his manic behavior is his confused way of fulfilling his Christ complex. Interspersed among Meredith's memories are letters from Cathy, whom Thomas married two years after the twins' mother died in childbirth. Cathy knows family secrets that she thinks explain her ex-husband's peculiar behavior. And to further support her view, Brown includes a few monologues by Murphy, the old black man who Cathy always assumed was some kind of family servant but who in fact played a more crucial and tragic role in Egan family history. There's a level of uncertainty crested here because no one ever seems to know what the other knows, and Brown maintains a compelling dialectic of trust and betrayal. The burden of secrets seems to overwhelm the burden of race here: a well-intentioned but somewhat drab debut novel. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Brown, a recipient of the distinguished Lyndhurst Prize, set himself the difficult task of writing his first novel from the perspectives of three different characters, none corresponding to his own life experiences. The primary narrator is a young girl named Meredith whose mother died just after Meredith and her twin brother were born. Their father, Thomas, is a brooding and diffident man, a doctor we assume is white, although he practices in a poor black New Orleans neighborhood, just as his father devoted his life to making mortuary sculpture for black families. As the novel begins, Thomas is hustling his sleepy children out of the house so that he can leave his second wife, Catherine, before she awakes. As Meredith tries to make sense of this abrupt dislocation, we begin to learn the complex secrets of her family's multiracial past from the second narrator, Murphy, an elderly black man once in the employ of Meredith's grandfather (and a character of tremendous dimension). Catherine is the third narrator; we hear her voice in the letters she writes to her stepdaughter, epistles that gleam with the glare of forbidden truths rarely revealed to adults, let alone to adolescent girls. Each facet of this bittersweet drama reflects the hideous tangle of racism and desire that has long warped and distorted relationships between whites and blacks. Brown explores this sensitive subject with consummate delicacy and eloquent intensity, making us feel the full weight of loss and regret, and the pain of inexpressible love. Donna Seaman

This promising first novel, which has already garnered attention in literary circles, moves from the 1930s to the 1960s as it tells the story of a "mixed blood" family in race-conscious New Orleans.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.