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By Tim Gautreaux Book Review by Hal Jacobs Move Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegon stories to Louisiana, add heat and Tabasco, and the result might easily be Tim Gautreaux's "Welding with Children." These stories have all the Keillor ingredients: humor, warmth, irony, suspense and endings that are either uplifting or poignant but never bleak or indifferent. These are stories about good, working-class folks going about their business and stumbling over situations that life hasn't prepared them for. If Gautreaux has more edge to his stories, one explanation is that his Cajuns must deal with three opposing forces: their personal code of ethics, the law of physics that says natural objects follow the path of least resistance, and the long, stupefying hot days and nights of a Louisiana summer. In the title story, Bruton, a welder and shade-tree mechanic with four daughters who are in the habit of regularly dropping off his four grandchildren, decides to get his act together after he drives up to the Pak-a-Sak with his grandkids and overhears two geezers call his Chevrolet Caprice a "bastardmobile." He realizes that it's too late to change his daughters, "four dirty blondes with weak chins from St. Helena Parish [who] thought they lived in a Hollywood soap opera." So he sits under the tree of knowledge at the courthouse, talks with one of the village elders and receives the following words of wisdom: join the Methodists, keep the grandchildren with him as much as possible and clean up your yard. In other words, Bruton learns, "Everything worth doing hurts like hell." And he's not the only one who receives that message. So does the parish priest in "Good for the Soul." He reluctantly honors a dying man's last request, which involves returning an eight-cylinder Toronado with no muffler that the man stole from a neighbor more than ten years ago. So does the retired maintenance foreman in "Resistance" - he helps the emotionally battered girl living next door with her science project on resistors. Anybody who has ever prayed for last-minute help with a science project is guaranteed a lump in the throat after reading this one. In "Misuse of Light" a camera store clerk buys a fifties-era Roleiflex from a young woman, develops the roll of film he finds inside and becomes intrigued by the image of a beautiful woman leaning against a ship railing. His fascination leads him to unraveling a family tragedy that involves the camera and the last shot of the woman on the roll of film. In "The Piano Tuner," a woman from a family of Creole planters, the last of the line, depends on the kindness of a piano tuner to leave her house and take her place in the world, which turns out to be a piano player in a motel lounge. History of small places. That's the minor key these stories are written in. When time moves slow, memory looms large. And if you lose your memory, you may wander around a WalMart parking lot until a driver slouched behind the wheel of a parked Ford sedan notices you and hisses, "What's wrong with you, gramps?" That's what happens to retired farmer Etienne LeBlanc in "Sorry Blood." "`Do you know me?' the old man asked in a voice that was soft and lost. "The driver looked at him a long time, his eyes moving down his body as though he were a column of figures. `Yeah, Dad,' he said at last. `Don't you remember me?' He put an unfiltered cigarette in his mouth and lit it with a kitchen match. `I'm your son.'" What happens next should be added to the subgenre of Southern fiction entitled "What Happens When Nice People Meet Sorry White Trash." On a scale of 1 to 10, with Dickey's "Deliverance" being 10 and Flannery O'Connor's collected works coming in at 7, "Sorry Blood" deserves a solid 5. The lesson for LeBlanc is simple: a life without memories is a life of nightmares and strangers. Some of these stories by Gautreaux, a native of Louisiana who teaches creative writing at Southeastern Louisiana University, first appeared in "The Atlantic Monthly," "Harper's," "Ploughshares" and "Georgia Review." One story that hasn't been published elsewhere, and should get big laughs from creative writing seminar attendees on both sides of the table is "The Black Cat Writers' Conference." It's a jaundiced look at the backwaters of the publishing ecosystem, but, even here, Gautreaux can't avoid leaving behind a poignant message. "What makes good writing?" asks aspiring writer Brad Sandle, "a neat, tanned little man who'd always wanted to write something more significant than contracts and briefs." The answer is: "God or hard work." In this collection of short stories, Gautreaux's hard work is obvious, and God is never far behind. | top |
from The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Sunday, November 28, 1999 |