| Author: |
Robert Ziegler |
| Dated: |
Thursday, February 12 2004 @ 07:01 AM EST |
| Viewed: |
2573 times |
|
Tim Gautreaux’s newest novel, *The Clearing,* is, as one reviewer on the cover jacket claimed, an American masterpiece of contemporary fiction. His book sets him into the company of Cormac McCarthy and Guy Vanderhaeghe, also masters of the genre of historical/pioneer fiction. As McCarthy did in *All the Pretty Horses,* and Vanderhaeghe did in *The Englishman’s Boy,* Gautreaux creates the magical motion of a movie trapped between book covers.
Gautreaux is a master story teller who has done his research thoroughly; this powerful narrative, combined with a jeweler’s precision with language, leaves the reader to struggle with the desire to savor each sentence repeatedly while simultaneously being dragged towards the next page to see what happens next.
The plot is essentially the chronicling of the harrowing process men and women were subjected to, in order to eke out a living in the dense, foreboding forests of the Louisiana swamps, while the steady stream of gold was channeled back into the mansion in the north. With axes, cross-cut saws, and steam power, the men harvest gigantic cedars in conditions of mythic proportions. Clouds of insects and suffocating heat were elementary irritations, compared to the ever-present serpents, man-eating alligators beneath porches and mill catwalks, band saws snapping fingers and hands off routinely, ruthless, Chicago-based Mafia who send in a Trojan Horse filled with bootleg whiskey, imported whores, and card sharks who wait each weekend in the segregated clapboard casino to relieve the drunken workers of their hard-earned, meager wages.
With the turn of a hidden ace, the tables splinter, straight razors slice open jugulars, and the only law available to restore even a semblance of order, is Byron, the long-lost brother of Randall, the northern mill-owner’s second son. Randall was sent on the impossible mission of reclaiming his war-torn brother Byron from his nihilistic plunge into this bizarre oblivion. Byron, refuses to be bought by his father’s money, to don the cowl of the prodigal son and return home to redeem the father who had sent him to soldier in France, to witness for eternity all the horrors of that inferno; Byron is the deputy chosen to restore order! With a heart of stone, a pistol and a shovel, he ploughs a swath each Saturday night, through men black or white, who are bent on killing something.
Unlike Cormac McCarthy’s primarily males-against-an-unforgiving-universe, Gautreaux’s story makes room for women. The daily reality is hard as iron, but the women are as strong as their men. They not only come to grips with the floods, bullets, doctoring without anesthesia, isolation, mafia vendettas, and traditional male expectations, but they also manage to understand the mad motivations of their husbands, endure their obsessions and guide them past stunted, regressive impulses, then subtly maneuver them into alternatives that ultimately result in their mutual survival.
Through twistings of plot as sinuous and treacherous as the great river itself, this story of individual destinies, fleeting moments of free choice, and the gradual restoration of a scattered family in a country whose industrial greed was rapidly wiping out its own natural resources, extinguishing its ecosystems, and turning everything it touched into gold, is a saga that hurtles along on its own cleverly crafted course. When the final tree has fallen and the last piece of train track has been removed, we watch a closing scene not unlike the film O Brother Where Art Thou? On a two-man hand-car, a severely shattered Randall joins together with a somewhat born-again Byron, and the only witness to their exit from this once magnificent but now utterly barren wilderness is the blind mill horse, listening spellbound to the garbled sounds of Byron’s battery-powered Victrola.
Tim Gautreaux. *The Clearing.* New York: Knopf. 320 pages. ISBN: 0375414746. Hardcover US$23.00.
|
|
 |
|
