Tim GautreauxRecensioni

I loved these stories! The characters are really well drawn, and they are funny. The stories are just on the edge of being too weird, but have that rollicking quality like you find in Confederacy of Dunces. The book is really funny, the writing is great, and the ideas behind the stories are really original and varied. Loved this book.

If you like short stories this is a fine collection from a very talented writer.
Most take place in the south, and are about people down on their luck, or completely out of luck.

In the 1920’s during Prohibition, protagonist Randolph Aldridge, son of a Pennsylvania lumber baron, travels to Louisiana to find his elder brother, Byron, and manage one of his father’s sawmills. Randolph takes the train to Nimbus, an isolated logging town, where Byron functions as the arm of the law. Byron is estranged from his family after returning from his service in WWI, where he has suffered psychological trauma. The sawmill hands work hard, drink hard, and fight hard, often leading to violent confrontations. A mafia boss controls the local saloon and brothels, which adds to the violence.

The setting is vividly described. The writing is atmospheric and evokes a strong sense of the Louisiana swamps. The characters are particularly well-drawn. The relationship between the brothers is key. Byron has withdrawn to the edges of civilization and Randolph wants to help him reconnect with life. During his melancholy moods, Byron plays a series of sad songs on the Victrola. Randolph cares deeply for his brother, eventually making a significant sacrifice. The supporting characters are believable and given enough backstory to picture them as part of this small remote community. Even the blind horse has a unique personality.

I particularly enjoyed the writing style in passages such as: “Ella appeared in the doorway and leaned against the frame, looking at her brother-in-law. After a while she placed a finger below a dry blue eye. At first Randolph didn’t understand, but then he turned and saw that Byron was crying, his lips formed carefully around each note of the song issuing thin and one-dimensional from the mahogany cabinet. Randolph sat as still as wood, his lips parted, his disbelieving breath coming lightly between his lips. Out in the mill yard, rain began to fall, and the house shook as the blind horse bumped its head against the porch post.”

This book strikes a satisfying balance between character and plot. It is dark and violent but contains offsetting elements of decency and redemption. It features many voices, such as the northern outsiders, Cajuns, Creoles, African Americans, and Italians. It gets the reader thinking about how violence impacts people and nature. I am impressed by the author’s craftsmanship.

Del autor de la colección de relatos El mismo sitio, las mismas cosas, llega esta novela impregnada de un extraño y marcado sentido de la tradición y las nuevas oportunidades. Paul Thibodeaux es un atractivo joven casado con Colette, la mujer más hermosa del pequeño pueblo de Luisiana en el que crecieron. Para Paul, la vida es plena, con una mujer a la que ama, máquinas que reparar, y un bullicioso local al que ir a bailar. Pero Colette aspira
a más. Y cuando se desplaza a California en busca de una vida mejor, Paul la sigue para luego volver, a la espera de que ella se replantee su vida junto a él.
Cómo llegan a darse cuenta de la importancia de su hogar y de su matrimonio hace de esta novela una aventura durante la cual tomará forma una historia de amor. Un retrato viviente de un lugar y una cultura poco explorados por la ficción contemporánea. Tim Gautreaux escribe con ingenio y compasión, pero también con un ojo clínico para los detalles de una vida al más puro estilo sureño.

THE NEXT STEP IN THE DANCE (1998) was Tim Gautreaux's first novel and a pretty good one. Only a buck at the local GoodWill store, so a real bargain. About a young Cajun couple, Paul and Colette, in small town Louisiana. He's a machinist who loves his job and has no further ambitions. He also loves his extended family, dancing, drinking and brawling - the local pastimes. Colette, a bank teller, thinks she wants more. So she serves him divorce papers and moves to California. Paul follows her. They both prosper there but then things kinda go south, and she moves back home. Again, Paul follows her. She's pregnant, her mom dies, her father has dementia, and the local economy bottoms out. Very hard times ensue, but Colette works hard at various things and makes do, with help from friends and family. There is a Texas villain who wants Colette. Villainous, vicious things happen and Paul is grievously injured. His recovery is slow and painful. Eventually the two join forces to raise their son and buy a shrimp boat. There is a terrible storm in the Gulf. The boat and crew go missing. And so on. No more clues. You'll have to read the book.

The story starts out slowly, almost too slow, because, after almost a hundred pages, I didn't like Colette much and almost quit reading. But then I had spent that buck, so I stuck with it and the story got better, picked up momentum, and I developed a grudging respect for Colette and her grit. The last couple hundred pages really rolled downhill and I couldn't wait to read what happened next. Turned out to be quite a ride. And I liked how it all turned out

I'd never heard of Tim Gautreaux. He did write a couple more novels, but, well ... Never heard of him. But this was a pretty good read. Lots of local color and an inside look at blue collar life in bayou country. Highly recommended.

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER

Sam Simoneaux is the floor-walker at a major retailer in New Orleans when a little girl is stolen from her parents. His failure to prevent the theft costs him his job and embroils him in the lives of the girl and her family. His search for Lily brings him face-to-face with all the forms loss can take in a life and reconnects him with a loss of his own that needs answers.

There is a flavor to this novel that is uniquely Southern. You can feel the rock of the Mississippi River, see the small towns that line her shores, catch the stench of the backwaters in which the least civilized of the people live, and feel the pull of family that is forged in blood. Characters that make minor appearances come on scene with so much wisdom and carrying such harrowing stories of their own that not one of them feels superfluous or unnecessary.

Along with confronting loss, Simoneaux must also confront revenge, the need for it and the uselessness of it.

It occurred to him that maybe he should have learned along the way that something like revenge did matter. But what use was it? Settling old scores right? Paying back a son of a bitch? He wasn’t trained to think that way. His uncle had told him many times that revenge didn’t help anybody and that the punishment for being a son of a bitch was being one.

All of which does not keep the heart and soul from screaming for some immediate and visible justice to be inflicted on someone who has himself inflicted a wound that cannot and will not ever heal. When we bleed do we not think the blood of our assailant would perhaps be the only way to ease the pain?

He felt sick for her, but terrible for himself as well, for the thin shoulder he cupped in his right hand might have been his own sister’s or brother’s, and then he was crushed by a deeper understanding of what he had lost back before he knew what loss was. He didn’t know such a feeling could come so late…

What makes Sam such a remarkable character for me is how much he cares, how willing he is to accept not only his own culpability but responsibility that should probably fall onto other shoulders. He is wise, with a sharp mind, but he acts from his heart; his heart always wins out. He is, in a word, unforgettable.

This book was recommended to me by my Goodreads friend, Kirk Smith. I wish I could tell him now how much I enjoyed it and how grateful I am for being introduced to this author, but Kirk was recently killed in an accident, so I will have to miss that opportunity to share this with him. It seems appropriate that this book would be about loss. I’m pretty sure the world is missing a very good man in Kirk Smith and that countless lives are diminished by his absence.

Tim Gautreaux writes about the South and Louisiana the way you might speak of a old, mangy dog that you love but know others might not. His writing shows all the wounds and the rough underbelly of society, but somehow manages to convey that people who are struggling here are somehow more alive than their safer brothers in the settled North.

There are so many dangers and frightening animals in these pages. Cottonmouth snakes and alligators and mosquitoes that cover men like second skins, but nothing is as frightening or dangerous as the human element that stalks the swamps with guns and knives and lead pipes.

The two brothers who form the nucleus of this novel, Randolph and Byron Aldridge, are often in over their heads, trying to deal with lawlessness, personal vendetta, and immorality. Their relationship with one another is touching and real, constantly proving that old adage that blood is thicker than water...a theme that is reflected back at us in the persons of their main enemies, Buzetti and his cousin, Couch. There are strong women as well, represented by the wives of these men and their mixed-blood housekeeper, who weather both the difficult environment and the unpredictability of their men.

After dark, he thought too much and sometimes drank, and one quiet evening when he heard from across the yard Byron wake howlin out of another dreamed bloodletting, he saw that his one killing did not stack up against the ranks of German Kinder his brother had packed off to darkness. While this thought didn’t comfort him, it gave him perspective on the deep well of foreboding into which his brother sank each time he opened his eyes on a sunrise.

Byron, a man broken by war, is hiding the middle of a battlefield. Randolph, who is tied to his brother by memory and affection but fails to understand him, witnesses something of the horrors his brother has experienced and learns what it is to face an enemy with only the choice of kill or be killed. This is a tale of sacrifice and redemption, layered like a good Southern biscuit. I loved it.

Loved this book. It featured great characterisation and a refreshing change of setting for this reader. Highly recommended.½

The Missing. Tim Gautreaux. 2009. What a beautiful novel—Southern and Catholic! I have no idea why I ordered this book or how long I’ve had it, but once again, I am soooooooooooo sorry that I waited so long to read it. Sam Simoneaux was 6 months old when his family was murdered. Sam was saved because his father put him in the stove, and his uncle found him. This and his experiences in WWI left Sam confused and troubled about purpose and life. When he was working as a floor walker in a big department store in New Orleans, a young daughter of a couple of musicians from a river boat is stolen. Sam is blamed and fired. He is told that he can have his job back if he finds the girl. Sam gets a job on the river boat and the search begins. Eventually Sam not only finds the child, he also sees more ugliness and violence than he saw in the war and learns what his uncle tries to teach him, that those who do evil make their own hell. Gautreaux certainly knows Cajun Louisiana and life on a river boat. The book is violent and not for everyone, but it is also a story of love and redemption.

I read a lot of stories, and Tim Gautreaux has a voice unlike any other. His particular Louisiana tone is so precise, the strangeness of some of his characters is heartbreaking. They are everyday and odd at the same time. As the title of the collection indicates, they take risks and do things that no "ordinary" person would dream of doing, and they somehow seem not to regard the perils as we think they should. We cringe at the choices they make, we hope for the best, we turn the page, we sih.

El autor retrata los paisajes y gentes de Luisana con precisión y delicadeza. Esta novela es una elegía y una celebración de la vida sureña.. Un verdadero contador de historias...½

I first read Tim Gautreaux's short fiction and was more than impressed. "Good for the Soul" may be one of the best I've read. Short story writers don't always write great novels, but Gautreaux is an exception. "The Missing" is an outstanding novel. The characters, setting, dialogue, plot--they all click. Definitely worth reading.

Tim Gautreaux's writing is refreshingly straightforward. His stories accumulate one detail after another, with such a gripping attention to each perfect observation, one after another, that I accept these stories as fact as I read.

Gautreaux's characters are working-class tragic--not in the 'heroic working man' tradition of Steinbeck, though, because they never slip into archetype; Gautreaux's characters instead always remain deeply individual. His characters remain tiny, and flawed, and trapped in frequently horrific circumstances; and yet even so, somehow they reflect a philosophy where each individual deserves our compassion and understanding.

There is such a steady, unerring stream of terrific but entirely unornamented prose here that it's easy to forget how hard it is to write this way. So much of contemporary American fiction is exaggerated or inflated or excessively hysterical or heavily ornamented in some way, where characters are out-sized and unrealistic, that I've tuned out, a little, how writing doesn't always need to be fortissimo. Reading this collection was like coming home to a place that I'd forgotten existed.

For people not familiar w. Gautreaux, here is a link to a story, SHEEP, that is -not- in this collection, but is made available online from The Atlantic magazine, and was originally published by the great fiction editor Michael Curtis:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1999/06/sheep/377645/

I highly recommend Gautreaux's collection, along with everything else he ever published.

Also, everyone should subscribe to the Atlantic, just on principle.

An excellent book by this “southern lit” writer. While a bit “wordy” he paints quite a descriptive picture of life and times along the Mississippi early in the 20th century. The story revolves a round loss, hardship, crime, vengeance, and justice.

I found this book to be slow going at first - I am not fond of his highly flowery writing style- but once I adjusted to that the story flowed and I did enjoy the read. This was a bit too violent for me and seemed to lack optimism. Toward the end, the journey the two primary characters were on became more positive and redemptive. The descriptiveness of the author’s writing style is remarkable- this reader could almost feel the smothering nature of the Louisiana bayou.½

Tim Gautreaux’s The Missing is written beautifully, full of evocative prose, and Southern dialect. He has an original story to tell set in the mid 1920’s on a riverboat that takes people on dance cruises, with the man character, Sam Simoneaux, working on the boat while at the same time looking for a stolen child in and round the ports where they dock. The basic themes of the book are of justice, revenge and redemption. Sam struggles with all of these, and in the end eventually finds redemption for his murdered family and the loss of his own son to illness, by confronting his family’s murderers.

The reason I didn’t give this book a higher rating is because it is not a book that I will remember for long. The characters and the story will not stay with me, although I think I may remember that it was well written, but little else. His characters do not resonate and in the end will be quickly forgotten.

Sam "Lucky" Simoneaux has only been recently been released from the U.S. Army after returning from WWI. His life epitomizes his nickname since the war ended the moment he debarked the transport ship into France. Upon his return to the United States, he marries and employed for two years as a floorwalker with a New Orleans department store. However, while on duty one day, a 3-year-old is abducted within the store from her family. Accused by the owner of not following protocol in securing the store, Sam is fired but is promised re-employment if he finds the girl. Determined to find the girl, he obtains employment on a riverboat, which provides excursions with gambling, music and dance up the Mississippi River. Sam hopes that this venue might enable him to better search for the girl and return her to her grieving parents.

Although this novel is essentially about Sam's life on a riverboat while searching for the girl, it also provides an opportunity for Sam to reconcile his the fact that he was orphaned as a baby when his entire family was murdered by a mountain clan. Should he seek revenge or let the event go?

The two threads were seamlessly intertwined without problem. The author clearly portrays life on the river with the fellow employees on the riverboat, characters that Sam meets, and the towns visited. The story captured my attention as I accompanied Sam up and down the river with the paddle wheel beating the water.

The Missing takes place in New Orleans in the 1920s, and the writing is so vivid that you can almost smell the Mississippi River mud. Sam, the main character, works as a floorwalker in a department store until a young child is kidnapped from the store. He loses his job, and the following tale is across between a Cormac McCarthy novel and the film Raising Arizona. Tim Gautreaux does a beautiful job of bringing to life the Louisiana Cajun culture where music, food, and violence come together. There are crimes committed by families that live so far off the grid that they can only found on horseback, and no law enforcement agency will claim jurisdiction there. Like the Cajun Navy, Sam follows the path of trying to right wrongs, some of them recent and some of them so far in the past that the perpetrators have become their own victims. I can't wait to read another one of his books.

If you like short stories this is a fine collection from a very talented writer.
Most take place in the south, and are about people down on their luck, or completely out of luck.½

A great disappointment. Just prior to reading "The Clearing," I read three collections of his short stories, the great majority of which are excellent, and I couldn't wait to read more of his work. "The Clearing" turned out to be a slog to finish. Hard to believe it's even the same author, other than the Louisiana setting. A number of irritating techniques, e.g. alternating calling a main character Randolph and then "the mill manager." Lots of violence, which somehow becomes repetitive and makes the book more difficult to finish. As for the title, as some have noted elsewhere, the French translation's title "Le Dernier Arbre" (The Last Tree) might have been a better choice. A plea to the author - more short stories, please.½

Set in the swamplands of Louisiana this is the story of Colette, a highly determined and ambitions bank employee and her husband Paul, who is quite happy with his life as a machinist and has no ambition beyond being able to go to a bar and have a beer and a dance after work. It begins with Colette catching Paul out with another woman, and the reader's assumption is that he is a habitual philanderer. However I was surprised how quickly I realised my sympathies were largely with Paul, and despite the feeling that the intention of the book was for them to separate and then ultimately realise they were made for each other, it never did seem to me that they were a great match, and maybe they should have separated right then and there and have done with it.

My edition the book was the output of a small press who declare that their specialism is 'resurrecting under-celebrated, beautifully written books with a strong sense of place'. The book was originally published in 1998 and I wonder why it had been so 'under-celebrated'. For me, the problem was that it was so long winded. The writing was fine, and it did indeed have a strong sense of place, but for example setting page after page after page on a boat floating in the Gulf of Mexico wasn't going to give me a better sense of place than one more concise page might have done. Scenes just went on too long and had little to differentiate them. I hardly ever found myself on the edge of my seat. Perhaps the only time was the scene inside the boiler - now that was drama.

It was a relief to get to the last page, as it had been quite clear where the book was heading, I just had to slog along a long road to get there. I don't do book groups, but two book-group type questions did occur to me. Firstly - would the trajectory of the story have been different had the characters not been Catholic, with Catholic ideas of marriage and divorce, and secondly - did either of the protagonists really change at all - other than physically - during the course of the book. I'm not sure they did.

Louisiane, années 20. Une enfant est enlevée dans le grand magasin où travaille Sam Simoneaux comme gardien. Pris d'un sentiment de culpabilité, il va se lancer à la recherche de la petite fille. L'occasion de voyager sur le Mississippi à bord d'un bateau à vapeur et de retomber sur son propre passé familial.
Un suspense bien mené et un personnage auquel on ne peut que s'attacher.

I had been avoiding reading this book as I was dreading it pulling me down as it didn't seem to be a happy novel. However, although generally lots of bad things happen, there is joy and happiness among the pages. The sense of place is the most powerful thing in this novel It is set in a logging camp in a Louisiana cypress swamp in the 1920s and I could feel the darkness of the forest, the dampness of the air and see the clouds of insects and the numerous snakes. The noises of the logging camp were also well described, the steam engines and axes and the quiet when the day's work had finished. As the forest is cleared, the stumps of trees that were left is well described and the light that starts to filter through the trees as the belt of trees around the camp gets smaller and smaller is fascinating.
In this remote forest clearing live Byron, the estranged brother of Randolph, who Tim Gautreaux often refers to as the Mill Manager. There is the saloon that is the place of fights and card cheats and there are the workers. The novel deals with the pain of Byron who fought in the first world war and his healing.½

This set of short stories has some recent buzz on LT so I thought I'd sample it. The first and title story made me feel uneasy. We are all imperfect parents after all. But the second story made me fall entirely in love with Gautreaux. He is just a downright nice person, and though some of the next story lines are intimidating, I feel safe in his hands. Memorable!

I received a copy of this book from my LTSanta, Ridgewaygirl, who knew that I like short story collections, and I quite enjoyed it. The eleven stories here are set primarily in the deep South (Louisiana, to be specific), with a few exceptions. Gautreaux develops a wonderful sense of local color and community. Most of the characters are poor, uneducated, and flawed, struggling along against the tide. There's the grandfather babysitting his four daughters' four illegitimate children (two of whom have the fabulous names of Tammynette and Moonbean--not a misspelling); the elderly widow who tries to talk a burglar out of robbing and/or killing her while plying him with food; the priest who gets into more than one scrape for being unable to say no; the one-time heiress, aging and lonely, who befriends her piano tuner and ends up playing in a hotel lounge; and many many more. Gautreaux is a fine writer indeed, and I will undoubtedly seek out more of his work. (As a side note, I'm now reading Burning Bright a collection by Ron Rash, which rather pales in comparison.)