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Love and Death in Florida
A Review by Anna Godbersen

There is a recurring narrator in John Dufresne's subtle, thought-provoking collection of stories Johnny Too Bad: His name is Johnny, and he has a not universally popular dog named Spot and a quirky girlfriend named Annick, with whom things are occasionally stormy. Johnny writes stories. Not every story in Johnny Too Bad is Johnny's story, but they all could be. By the time you get to "Talk Talk Talk," in which a modern day Madame Bovary is given a happy ending, the themes are well established. Johnny is thinking about the slow approach of death, and fidelity, and love. He left a wife, sometime before Annick, after all, and we see the leaving or not leaving or betrayal of a spouse as a recurring plot in his fiction. The stories Johnny is writing have classic concerns indeed (they are about love and death, as he tells anyone who wants to know), but the stories of John Dufresne have that postmodern twist: They play with fact and fiction. Happily, Dufresne treads the fact and fiction line softly, and it never feels like the ham-fisted, tired literary gimmick you might imagine. Johnny Too Bad reads more like a mindscape: a heady mix of hope and regret, imagination and wonder.

Johnny, like Dufresne, lives in Florida, and though he doesn't waste words on a vast set piece, the weird and sometimes violent landscape is vivid nonetheless. Florida, says Johnny, is "rough on fiction writers. How do you compete with daily life here?" He doesn't compete, of course. He borrows from the real and the surreal all around him, seeming at times almost overwhelmed by this task. The writing in Johnny Too Bad can feel sketchy, present tense, as though the author is anxious that he will run out of time. He is that, too, of course, and it is a testament to the precision and originality of his voice that that anxiety is palpable.

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