"Requiem for Locusts" opens like Thornton Wilder's "Our Town," with a narrator introducing the world we're about to enter: "Consider a street, any street, in a neighborhood. Place this neighborhood in any town in any country in the world, or, for accuracy, place it in an affluent one, where the ties that bind people together have loosened and often broken apart." Indeed, Locust St., in this first novel by Wendy Parciak, is an affluent street.
But it's got room for a 13-year-old girl being raised by a single dad and a circus troupe living partly out of a crazy colored school bus. There's a yuppie couple and their two-year-old daughter, a shy old doctor whose closest friends are his cat and his garden, and a reclusive old spinster, Willow Stokes. The neighborhood is also home to a girl with mental illness, named Marzita, who provides the book with one of its most valuable offerings: Its implicit insistence that we begin to include the mentally ill in our view of those living in our neighborhoods.
Parciak does a fine job with many of these characters, but the one whom she realizes most powerfully is Marzita, the "freak girl" with the awkward gait and schizophrenia-like symptoms: compulsive writing on books and walls and furniture, cutting things up and tucking away the pieces, hallucinating and talking to the voices in her head, spending much of her time during these psychotic episodes in a fantasy world more hell than heaven, more war than peace:
"Today I was so bad I saw bad things, eyes and frowns and guns pointing pointing pointing. The black and blue eyes look up at me and drag me down, down deeper than the drugs in my poison blood drag me every day. First I try to sink, want to sink, push Mama away. Then something in me says, no not time for that, and I am pulled back to the surface by Mama's eyes. Still gray life-rafts."
Think of Benjy's monologue at the beginning of Faulkner's "The Sound and the Fury." Except where Benjy's chaotic view of his world is the result of a developmental disability, Marzita's stems from a mental illness, one whose etiology is fully revealed toward the novel's end.
Nor is Marzita the only one confronting mental illness. Like the author herself, who experienced mental illness in her own family, the character Janice St. Coeur carries inside her the memory of a sister with mental illness. Janice is not as fully realized as some of the other characters, but she takes on depth and seriousness near the end of the novel when she comes to terms with the memory of this sister:
"'Jennifer,' she whispered, turning around and around, wanting to call out her name but afraid she would wake the neighbors. Wanting to find her sister after losing her for so long, but knowing with a sinking feeling that she would not. Wanting to have a sister again, even one who was crazy, who loved Janice unconditionally without knowing how imperfect Janice really was."
In fact, many of the characters -- Marzita, Janice and her yuppie husband, Dr. Norton, the old spinster, and the 13-year-old Eugenia who spices up her day with fantasized narrative flourishes -- carry on interior monologues, and this becomes one of the novel's threads that binds the people of Locust St.
If you prefer the sparse, understated language of the modern novel, you will have to make some accommodations for "Requiem." Parciak displays a style that is at times old-fashioned: "Demetrios Zeferatos stretched as he clambered out of bed. He yanked the curtain aside and grinned at the sun, already bright white in the blue sky and rising above the telephone wires." At times it is lush: "...his head filled with an image of an inflorescence of chokecherry flowers, which developed as if filmed by time-lapse photography. Small yellow-greenish-white petals opened, then fell off, pushed out of the way by the green ovaries, which swelled and turned rose, then red, than maroon." Parciak has a degree in ecology, and her descriptions of backyard flora and fauna are small treasures in the narrative. There is a musical motif in the novel, too -- Carl Orff's "Carmina Burana" -- whose lyrics have us look at how those things that are dark and tormented serve as a foundation for love and life.
That darkness and torment find a spectacular realization in the book's climax. And in its aftermath, we find Marzita in a place that people with severe mental illness often find themselves: a hospital. What treatment she'll receive is left to the reader's imagination. But by this time, Marzita has catalyzed Locust St., breaking down the barriers that have separated her neighbors.
In "Requiem," we see how many of the traumatic experiences of our lives -- loneliness, estrangement, old age and mental illness -- need to be openly acknowledged and accepted as the very experiences that can bring us together.