When a plot grossly outweighs the main story, as it does here, the form is inefficient or else the novel is satirical. Bellefleur is definitely not satirical. It is an incredibly elaborate gothic romance, stuffed to overflowing with outsize, grotesquely intense characters who speak to one another breathlessly, in a rage or merely incoherently, and who beg to be taken as emblems for moral qualities or historical forces, or both. (p. 4)
It is certainly possible to read and enjoy a novel with characters and incidents like these: Faulkner, Garcia Márquez, Flannery O'Connor, and many other modern writers have asked us to face grotesque forms of violence, and by so doing have explored basic themes of character and destiny. But when there is no dramatic logic to those events and characters, when what happens is not inevitable but merely gratuitous, the book fails to move or inform us. Particularly disturbing in this case, however, is not that Bellefleur fails to move or inform us, but that it seems to function as a means of expressing the author's fantasies, for that is what one is forced to conclude from the sheer gratuitousness of the violence and nightmare. Dreams and fantasies hold to different logic than that of narrative art, which is why people quickly grow bored when one tries to recount them; they have a use solely for the dreamer and the fantasizer.
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