©1996, ProMotion, inc.
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Review by Laurie Parker
Tim Gautreaux has a lot to live up to. The jacket blurbs for his debut collection are from writers of the highest rank, writers such as Andre Dubus, Robert Olen Butler, and Shirley Ann Grau. Such high praise leaves Gautreaux with much to prove.
The delightful thing about Gautreaux's writing is that it meets and exceeds every expectation created by his preliminary reviews. The 12 stories in Same Place, Same Things are each exquisite windows into the lives of "ordinary," hardworking, blue-collar Cajuns making their ways in the world of modern-day Louisiana. These stories remind the reader of William Faulkner's Nobel Prize speech: the Cajuns have survived due to their strength, their resiliency, and the joy they find in life, the "laissez les bon temps roulez" attitude with which they face the world. These characters endure. Gautreaux captures this spirit in his stories, allowing it to illuminate his writing like lightning bugs in a mayonnaise jar light a dark room on a summer night.
If Gautreaux's stories are often dark, it is only because they are realistic. The life of a blue-collar worker in the heat and hard times of south Louisiana is not often easy. Gautreaux's characters are farmers, train engineers, pump repairmen, exterminators, supermarket meatcutters, unemployed mill workers, and crewmen on tugboats navigating the mighty Mississippi. Losing a job in Louisiana's hard economic times may mean facing the humiliation of the unemployment line for months, or even years. These characters find their pride and their identities in their jobs, hard and backbreaking as they might be. While fate conspires to deal these people a bad hand, much more is riding on the line than one might think.
For instance, the engineer in "Waiting for the Evening News" (one of two stories in the collection awarded the National Magazine Award) has a house that is paid for, a steady job he could do in his sleep, and a wife. To top things off, it is his birthday. In less than an instant, however, his safe and orderly world is destroyed in the conflagration of burning train cars spilling their toxic cargo into the streets of a nondescript backwater town, "one of a row of asbestos-siding-and-tin communities strung along the railroad like ticks on a dog's backbone." Gautreaux's depiction of how this small, sad man deals with the consequences of his actions is a study in denial, despair, and redemption. The story is also a shining example of the love that Gautreaux feels for his characters. He accepts them with all their failings, loves them, and takes joy in the grace they exhibit in the hardest of circumstances.
It in no way takes away from Gautreaux's talent to say that his knowledge of the people of south Louisiana comes naturally to him. Gautreaux is a native of the area, and taught creative writing at Southeastern Louisiana University for many years. It is one thing, however, to know a region and its people; it is quite another to make that distinct culture come alive. Gautreaux is never heavy handed with his regional touches. His characters may season their conversation with dashes of French, but they are not constantly eating crawfish and dancing at the fais-do-do. They are characters, not caricatures.
More than any book I've ever read, even more than John Kennedy Toole's masterpiece A Confederacy of Dunces, Same Place, Same Things captures south Louisiana. Human comedy and human tragedy are captured within its pages. James Lee Burke is right when he says these characters could easily be characters in an Elizabethan drama. Read Same Place, Same Things. You will be disappointed when you have turned the last page, and you will join me in waiting impatiently for the next book by Tim Gautreaux.
Laurie Parker has recently returned to South Louisiana, where she works as Marketing Manager for LSU Press.
©1996, ProMotion, inc.