'Salt Palace' a heady brew ~ Gordon Houser (as the review appeared in The Wichita Eagle, Sunday, October 23, 2005)
'The Salt Palace,' Darren DeFrain's first novel, is a unique mixture of genres -- a road trip and religious novel with enough suspense to keep the reader on edge. But at heart it's a coming-of-age novel, though Brian, the narrator, is in his 30s.
DeFrain, who is the new director of the writing program at Wichita State University, blends a first-person narrative full of movement and introspection with footnotes by a third-person narrator (the author?), mostly about Mormonism and the Utah Jazz, who played their games at the Salt Palace in Salt Lake City from 1979 to 1991.
Brian is a sympathetic character, full of flaws yet aware of them. He carries the burden of religious guilt, having grown up Mormon and failing to carry through on his two-year mission, a kind of culminating achievement in Mormon maturity, usually performed during the college-age years. He is also weighed down by guilt from a relationship with a non-Mormon girl that ended with an abortion.
The theme of mortality raises its head early in the novel when one of Brian's workmates at the First of America Bank is Kalamazoo, Mich., keels over at work with a heart attack and dies. Seeking solace first in coffee (forbidden to Mormons), then in his "Gentile" girlfriend Rhoda, a Catholic (also out of bounds), Brian gets a call from his brother Zach asking him to drive to the family home in Kaysville, Utah, that their parents are selling. Zach wants Brian to pick up his and Brian's belongings.
After seeing a note in the Western Michigan University union about needing a ride to Utah, Brian connects with Randy, who must be one of the more arresting characters in recent fiction, and the story, already moving along nicely, gets cooking.
Randy, who did his two-year mission, is not your typical Mormon, if there is such a thing. He has an artificial arm with a hook on the end, uses colorful language, likes his beer and speaks his mind, undeterred by politeness.
He also carries a gun and is being tracked by a couple of mysterious men. His past comes out in pieces of conversation, and the threats from the two men grow alarming. But this is not a crime novel. The suspense lurks just beyond Brian's search for direction, for some reconciliation with his past -- the point of the novel -- and his obsession with the Utah Jazz, in the midst of the 1996 NBA playoffs.
With its mixture of genres, its jumps between arcane trivia and its main narrative, this is a postmodern novel with a postmodern protagonist, full of ambivalence. Steeped in Mormonism, Brian believes only that "this is [the Jazz's] year." This is "one place for in faith in my life."
The book has many comic moments that express Brian's ambivalence. He describes Rhoda thus: "She drinks like a man, I think, and I'm pretty sure that's something I don't like about her."
DeFrain uses imagery of light and dark as if the night sky is a source of revelation often obscured by Brian's muddled life. He finally makes it to his parents' house and helps them load the moving van. "It is completely dark...and there are no stars shining through the clouds; only the smallest portion of moonlight is making it down to me in my parents' drive-way." In several scenes he looks from the dark outside upon someone illuminated from within the house.
Often he is looking in from outside, wanting to experience the real, whatever that is. He reflects, "The present is some long justification of our past we keep arriving at, only we can't ever arrive there."
The novel's ending is startling and ambiguous, unfinished (like the playoffs), uncertain, much like Brian's life. The story reverberates and unsettles, long after reading.