The Sound of Building Coffins by Louis Maistros

In The Sound of Building Coffins, Louis Maistros depicts a New Orleans where the living and the dead co-inhabit the same places, confounding each other’s paths, all against a backdrop of voodoo demons and Cajun bogeymen and the music of an imminent modernity. Maistros’s novel is a painstakingly authentic depiction of New Orleans at the birth of the Jazz Age, and also a myth of the birth of Jazz itself.

I like Maistros’s New Orleans. I like its spaces and its dirt and its sounds. This is a New Orleans where Jesus tells the preacher and exorcist Noonday Morningstar to “Get the fuck out of this house.” The city teeters on the precipice of natural and supernatural disaster alike, but it never turns into a landscape where good and evil battle for possession, rather, it operates like a dance floor, where the two circle each other, where good is not completely good, and evil not entirely irredeemable, and sometimes the two become indistinguishable. Using the power of jazz—not God—the preacher Noonday performs the exorcism.

Describing the sprawling plot in a review would be like describing New Orleans in a sentence: difficult and probably inadequate. On a broad level, the story revolves around seven people who participate in an exorcism and its after-effects. At the center of the story is Typhus Morningstar, son of the exorcist Noonday, one of the five siblings of the Morningstar clan, all affectionately named after beautiful sounding diseases.

After his father’s death, Typhus stops growing in size. A man in a child’s body, he’s a conflicted cynic who nurses the ideal of love in a yellowing photograph of an unknown girl. Typhus rides on an ancient bicycle around the city like a prematurely aged boy, rebirthing dead fetuses as catfish.

He held the baby’s arms to its sides with the slightest pressure, his left hand moving up and down along the child’s right arm in a sweeping caress. Its smooth skin yielded to his touch like clay, gradually melting to its side. Seamlessly. He repeated this process with the left arm until both sides were a perfect match…Typhus held the newly shaped fetus underwater….Said the thing that he always said at this point: ‘They gave it to me, but I gave it back the best I could.’”

Despite the magical realism that drives the novel, Maistros gives an unsentimental depiction of the racial, economic, and religious turmoil that formed turn-of-the-twentieth-century New Orleans. Maistros’ characters are not consumed by the turmoil, they adapt to it, even as it threatens to destroy them. Typhus’s sister Diphtheria is a girl, and, “Opportunities of employment for young girls in the Parish came down to whoring or factory and field work. Whoring paid better than the others—and wasn’t much dirtier all told—so the choice was bitter but obvious.” Diphtheria spends five years working out of a crib where she keeps a knife under her pillow. When the father of Diphteria’s unborn child abandons her, she bears the child anyway, bleaches her skin to the “high yella” color, and trades her low-rent crib for a high-class whorehouse. The subject of the life of a prostitute is one that too often invites the prose that depicts it to be either too maudlin or too coarse, but Maistros handles her story with characteristic deftness. Diphtheria is not a victim. She is not a saint either. She survives as long as she chooses to.

Maistros is much more adept in creating characters like Typhus and Diphtheria—melancholy and wonderfully frangible (the dead far outnumber the survivors by the end of the book)—than he is in delivering a cohesive plot. It is a combination of his unique portraitures, however, and his frank acknowledgment of the human condition that makes The Sound of Building Coffins so arresting. He writes:

Through pain you teach God right from wrong. It is never the other way around. Never has been and never will be. It’s the reason we are here on this earth, little sister. We are educating God. With a pain that he could never feel.”

And while the myriad storylines become clumsy at times, Maistros manages to bring all the strands of the plot to bear in the final pages, when, true to life, a hurricane breaks the levees, destroying and redeeming the city.

Reviewed by Jajah Wu

The Sound of Building Coffins by Louis Maistros
Toby Press, 2009
Cloth, pp 360, $24.95
ISBN-10: 1592642551