Book Review: Postmarked Baltimore

J. Conrad Guest for “The Smoking Poet” has reviewed Postmarked Baltimore, the latest novel by Jeff LeJeune.

On New Year’s Eve, 1989, Father Perry Burns sits, haunted by his many regrets. Fifteen years have elapsed since he fled, without a word, from the woman he loved, the result of a shameful indiscretion. Father Burns has just received a letter from Noel, who managed to trace his whereabouts. Recently widowed and a mother, Noel fills in Perry on her life and also expresses the hurt with which Perry left her. She is over him, she writes, but still loves the memory of what they shared.

A great portion of Postmarked Baltimore is told in flashback, as Perry relives the events that led up to his decision to join the priesthood.

Author Jeff LeJeune relates Burns’s story with great sensitivity, creating in Burns a protagonist who is mostly unlikable and tormented, while allowing the reader to catch an occasional glimpse of Burns’s goodness ― a man driven to do what is right yet fearful of hurting Noel, a slave to his baser drives, and filled with self-loathing the result of his salacious thoughts as well as his actions. Like many addicts, Burns is driven not so much by an evil nature but by an inability to help himself.

At times Postmarked veers dangerously close to melodrama, but the reader forgives the occasional indulgence for more frequent moments of near brilliant prose:

”Sometimes it can be more difficult to forget memories of things that never happened than things that did; the ones that never happened are stainless, fashioned and refashioned in the mind until perfection is attained. Those images of him and Noel together had been arranged like a restaurant table setting, neat and tidy and ready for use and feasting. Instead, he was forced to sit at the table and avoid the setting and the food. He couldn’t eat. He couldn’t even touch the silverware. No one told him he couldn’t leave, but he couldn’t unfold his limbs into a walking posture either. There was no closing time. So he just sat there while the waiters waited and the managers managed and the closers closed, bogged down and slumped over in front of the perfect dish he couldn’t eat.. He couldn’t even touch it. It wasn’t real. And that is the knife that slices men to pieces when our plans with love don’t materialize. It’s not real. Never was. But you swear it had been at one time, just last week, just yesterday, hell, just a minute ago. All of it was real.”

Recommended reading.

To purchase Postmarked Baltimore by Jeff LeJeune, please click here.