Christopher Rice, A Density of Souls
A while ago I had read and was quite impressed by Christopher Rice’s second novel, The Snow Garden. I thought it was a pretty entertaining even though gloomy mystery and I wanted to give a try to A Density of Souls. Unfortunately, this one disappointed me.
In A Density of Souls, a novel set in New Orleans, a friendship between four childhood friends; Meredith Ducote, Stephen Conlin, Greg Darby and Brandon Charbonnet, is compromised by their entering high school. Greg and Brandon are part of the football team while Stephen belongs to the theatre company. He is publicly outed by his two ex-friends as he himself is trying to come to terms with his homosexuality. Meredith’s position is more ambiguous: she is torn between her popularity as a cheerleader and as Greg’s girlfriend and a feeling of pity combined to a remaining sense of loyalty to Stephen.
One day, during an important football game between schools, a tragic accidental death occurs which soon triggers a second death. For several New Orleans families, things will never be the same again… Five years later, as Stephen and Meredith are both in college, another tragedy, on a much greater scale, is about to happen. Its roots lie in the past and in the relationships between the four who were once friends…
If the premises of the story intrigued me, after a while, I began to lose interest. When the revelations came out at the end, I didn’t even care anymore (I also wondered if maybe Rice borrowed some ideas from Ruth Rendell’s The Chimney Sweeper’s Boy?) A Density of Souls is not so much a mystery as a questioning on sexual identity and a denunciation of homophobic persecution. I don’t mind at all the fact that one of the main characters in the novel is gay, but here the subject is predominant and all the male characters have homosexual tendencies, which made the novel pretty unrealistic. Rice displays a very simplistic, biased and dark vision of the world. I thought his wanting to make a point about homosexuality and homophobia became an impediment to writing a good mystery: it seemed to me that Rice could not choose between genres. Obviously, his second novel achieves what this one couldn’t and also raises other subjects beside homosexuality. All the characters in Rice’s novels are either confused about their sexuality, alcoholic, violent or crazy. This becomes very tedious after a while. Christopher Rice sure can write but if what you are looking for is a good mystery, skip this one…
Rating: 2/5
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