A Yankee in Milltown
Novelist Tim Gautreaux breaks out of the Southern boys’ club
There’s a definite boy’s club in contemporary Southern literature. These guys write dark novels that are often violent, full of men alienated from society and the harsh landscape surrounding them. Some of the writers chafe under the label “Southern,” claiming they could be writing anywhere, but it’s hard to believe them when they keep choosing swamps, sharecroppers and gun-toting tortured souls as their subject matter.
At first glance, Tim Gautreaux’s latest, The Clearing (coming out in paperback on Vintage in May), appears to be another gritty realist historical novel: The action takes place in a Louisiana mill town where the men are desperate or hungry with some unknown longing, and the landscape is oppressive and ravaged. Published last summer, the book earned advance praise from such anointed guy writers as Larry Brown, Charles Frazier and William Gay. Gautreaux, though, has always struggled against type, and so his protagonists here are outsiders, two brothers from Pittsburgh. This is not a small decision: Point of view is what drives a novel, directing the reader’s consciousness. Murder and mayhem occur in The Clearing, but seeing them through an outlander’s eyes provides a new perspective—perhaps even a new critical commentary on this dark South.
Born and raised in Louisiana and writer-in-residence at Southeastern Louisiana University, Gautreaux is the author of another novel and two previous collections of short stories. He’s been writing respectable and widely published fiction for years, but it’s only with the The Clearing that he has received the critical acclaim his fans have long been anticipating. Lorraine Lopez, assistant professor of English at Vanderbilt University, invited Gautreaux to read at the school because, she says, his stories are always “well-structured, well-imagined, well-nuanced and beautifully written,” and his characters are “complex, fascinating and usually funny.”
From the opening chapter of The Clearing, it’s obvious that this is a writer who has learned how to create setting and atmosphere. The mill town where the men work is called Nimbus—a fitting name, for in this imagined world the characters and the reader are surrounded in a swirl of sensory images. The inside of a commissary is described as full of “syrupy darkness,” while one of the protagonists wears the “haunted expression of a poisoned dog.” At the same time, Gautreaux understands pacing and characterization, never losing the reader in a world of indulgent description. It’s a good bet The Clearing won’t be his last highly praised novel.
The author reads from his work, 8 p.m. March 23 in Wilson 126 on the Vanderbilt University campus.
—Lacey Galbraith
