MY JULIET
by John Ed Bradley
The steamy ambience of suburban New Orleans tartly flavors this latest (following Smoke, 1994, etc.) of Bradley’s wistfully comic portrayals of likable losers and the hardhearted women who rev up, then clog their engines.
The helpless male is Sonny LaMott, a moderately gifted portrait and landscape painter, into his 30s and going nowhere, idling along on hopeful dreams of reunion with the girl who left home (and him) 15 years earlier. The fateful femme is Juliet Beauvais, a heedless beauty who walked out on her wealthy family for a brief “career” in California as an “actress” (in porn films, Sonny sadly learns). Juliet returns, hell-bent on shocking her kinfolk and neighbors, retrieving her share of the Beauvais fortune—and proving that her nice-as-pie mother “Miss Marcelle” had engineered her beloved daddy’s “accidental” death by drowning. Soon the passive Sonny finds himself spinning dizzily in Juliet’s orbit (and clutches) once again. Thereafter, the story veers agreeably between murder mystery and R-rated demonstration of the assertion (made to Sonny by an older fellow artist) that “Love is a torture and women the whip.” Some vivid supporting characters pop up, including Sonny’s bartender buddy Louis Fortunato, planning to “whack” the veterinarian he holds responsible for the death of his pet cat Frank; bisexual jazzman Leonard Barbier, who seems to have slept with just about everybody who’s anybody; and the Beauvais’ iron-willed black housemaid Anna Huey (who might be the half-sister of creepy Mrs. Manders in Du Maurier’s Rebecca). There’s a lot going on in this novel, which distinguishes it some from Bradley’s earlier, laxly plotted, more self-indulgently sentimental work. The identity of Miss Marcelle’s killer isn’t much of a surprise, and the explanation for Juliet’s bizarre behavior is both a little too neat and much too conventionally Freudian. Still, My Juliet has energy, and its fair share of hangdog southern gothic-comic charm.
Bradley’s best yet, and an encouraging sign that he’s finally starting to put it all together.