Children and Steamboats: The Missing by Tim Gautreaux

The Missing by Tim Gautreaux

I love Tim Gautreaux's dedication pages. In his debut short story collection, Same Place, Same Things, he writes, "For my wife, Winborne, and our two sons, Robert and Thomas. I would also like to thank the National Endowment for the Arts. I suppose I could have thanked them first, but they haven't ever baked me biscuits." Welding With Children, the second collection, is dedicated "To my teachers, who knew that every fact is a coin." And in The Missing, Gautreaux offers this dedication: "For my father, Minos Lee Gautreaux, who taught me to love children and steamboats."

These three dedications say a good deal about the kind of stories Gautreaux writes, old-fashioned tales where the best characters are not those who achieve great deeds, but those able to happily inhabit modest lives, enjoy simple pleasures, and act in a spirit of decency, kindness, and responsibility towards their fellow travelers in the world. In Gautreaux's universe, these qualities bring about their own rewards, while their inverse invite a host of miseries.

If this vision sounds impossibly naive and wholesome to you, then you've clearly never experienced the joy of reading a Tim Gautreaux book. It works because Gautreaux isn't prone to dewy-eyed nostalgia for a golden small town America, and he understands that even the best of us can't save ourselves from loss, pain, and the hundreds of small meannesses that people enact upon one another.

Sam Simoneaux, the protagonist of The Missing, is a man who has known that kind of loss. When he was a baby, Sam's entire family was gunned down in a vengeance killing, himself spared only because his father managed to hide him in a cold furnace. At the book's beginning, he and his wife have just lost their infant son to a fever. And then, on his watch as a floorwalker in a New Orleans department store, a little girl named Lily is kidnapped. It's 1921, and between spotty local law enforcement, slow communications, and widespread shady adoption practices of the time, the chances of recovering her are slim.

After the kidnapping, Sam loses his job, and guilt-ridden, tracks down Lily's parents and offers to help find her. The girl's parents are performers on a steamboat that specializes in pleasure cruises up and down the Mississippi. Suspecting someone might have noticed Lily on one of these cruises, Sam joins the crew as a third mate, responsible for frisking passengers for weapons, breaking up fistfights, and playing piano with the band whenever their itinerary takes them to a backwater where the boat's black orchestra might be in danger.

It's in these parts of the book that Gautreaux's writing feels most colorful and lived in, which isn't surprising as his grandfather was a steamboat captain and his father, a tugboat captain. All along the river, Sam puts out feelers, makes connections, and ventures into territories populated by generations of violent outlaws who operate outside the jurisdiction of any law enforcement.

As Sam's quest brings him closer to finding Lily, it also brings up old questions about his family's fate, and he faces the problem of how a good man can earn justice when the law is corrupt or indifferent, and the lawless go unpunished. The answers are hard-won, and the book's conclusion is both satisfying and bittersweet.

I checked this book out from the library, but after reading it, I plan to go out and buy a copy. Like all of Tim Gautreaux's books, I suspect this is one I'll be reading and re-reading for years to come.

And if you haven't read Gautreaux's short stories, "Floyd's Girl" and "Died and Gone to Vegas" are two of our favorites. My favorite story, "The Courtship of Merlin LeBlanc," isn't available online, but it's in Same Place, Same Things, and is well worth your time.

The Last Good Day: Antediluvian Tales by Poppy Z. Brite

Antediluvian Tales by Poppy Z. Brite

During my baby doll dress-wearing, 'zine-swapping, poetry slamming alterna-teen days, I was aware of Poppy Z. Brite, and though I'd never read one of her books, I did not like her. Part of this can probably be attributed to my teenage disdain for the goth aesthetic, but looking back, I think I was mostly just jealous that someone not that much older than me was already so successful and driven as a writer.

And then, ten years later, I was assigned to review the Courtney Love book Dirty Blonde, and picked up Brite's excellent biography for background research. Reading it, I realized that I hadn't given Brite a fair shake. So, I picked up her trio of Rickey and G-Man books, Liquor, Prime, and Soul Kitchen, and by the time I was through with them, not only was I shamed by my youthful rush to judgment, I had a new favorite author.

I love everything about Brite's writing. I love her dark humor, her lovably debauched, soul-searching characters, and her insights into the restaurant business and tantalizing descriptions of food. I love the way she writes about New Orleans. I love her range as a writer, and though it sounds a bit melodramatic to phrase it as such, her integrity to her craft.

Everyone in New Orleans was impacted by Hurricane Katrina, to understate it by a mile. And as the city rebuilds (or doesn't) and as people move back (or don't), it's clear that New Orleans will always be New Orleans, but it won't be like it was. Though it's only a small part of the social fabric, it's interesting to see what that means for writers and artists like Brite, whose work has always been so rooted in the city.

Antediluvian Tales doesn't spell out what that means for Brite, but in her introduction, she makes it clear that things are going to be, will have to be, different:

"After the events of 2005, though, I couldn't see pairing stories I'd written before the flood with those I'd written after; for better or worse, my life, my outlook, and, necessarily, my work has changed forever... Whatever else they may be, the stories in this little collection now seem almost impossibly innocent to me."

The characters will be familiar to those who know Brite's fictional universe. Five of them are about the Stubbs family, and two about the author's ambiguously gendered alter ego, Dr. Brite, coroner of New Orleans. However, their arrangement is eclectic. Although Brite includes an appendix which allows the stories to be read chronologically, the stories are arranged in the order she found most pleasing.

Though I liked them all, the Stubbs family stories are the strongest in the collection. Brite struck gold when she created this family, a sort of Yoknapatawpha County, NOLA-style (i.e. all the pain without any of that pretentious, beholden-to-the-past southern stoicism, which isn't as dignified as it's cracked up to be).

Standouts include "The Feast of St. Rosalie," where G-Man's lonely, divorced sister considers the connection with her beatific namesake, and "The Devil of Delery Street," a comically sinister story where the Stubbs family is haunted by a ghost that's both malicious and attention-starved. The collection also includes a nonfiction piece, "The Last Good Day of My Life," where Brite contemplates a day she spent birdwatching, eating, and adventuring in Cairns, Australia shortly before Hurricane Katrina. It's one of those seemingly insignificant, yet rare and perfect days, the kind that Brite says, "you probably only get a half-dozen or so in a lifetime, and that's if you're lucky."

And then days after that perfect day, life changed forever. While memories of that trip helped her get through much of 2005 and 2006, she's also found that since then, she has trouble leaving the city now. Brite says, "Until I overcome this, there will be no more truly good days no matter where I am. No more cassowaries or mudskippers... No more adventures except maybe the kind you're forced into. No more coming home."

However her work may change in the future, I'm glad that Brite found a home for the stories in this book. It's a slim, yet wonderful collection that ends one chapter in a writer's career, but leaves the door open for a great deal of exciting and much-anticipated work. It's also worth noting that Brite's future Rickey and G-Man books (she has planned three more for the series) will have a different, though as yet unspecified publisher. In "The Last Good Day of My Life," Brite alludes to an editor who attempted to exploit her Katrina experiences. Though I'm not sure about the particulars here, Brite ended her relationship with Three Rivers Press shortly after the publication of her last novel, Soul Kitchen.

Silly editors. Don't ever ask a southerner to exploit anything about their southern-ness, natural disasters included. Haven't they ever listened to "Outfit" by DBT?

The Southern Girl's Guide to Gracious Living: Girls in Trucks by Katie Crouch

Girls in Trucks by Katie Crouch

I suppose I should count myself lucky that my mother wasn't a debutante, that I was never forced to go to Cotillion classes, and that when my freshman year roommate asked me if I was going to rush, I had no idea what she was talking about (after she told me how many dresses it involved, I decided against it).

Still, there's something about the southern debutante that I find myself powerless to resist, a certain trashy mystique. After all, it's not every woman who can smoke a Marlboro Light in white cotton gloves or puke up a liter of Jim Beam without messing up her lipstick.

Sarah Walters is a Charleston-born and bred deb, though she isn't very good at it. She's a little bit plain and shy, and though good manners and heavy drinking come easily to her, things like female friendship and husband-hunting are more elusive.

Girls in Trucks follows Sarah as she ditches Charleston for a lackluster career in publishing and journalism in New York, and as she embarks on one disastrous and wrong relationship after another. She keeps in touch with her fellow, former debs, Annie, Bitsy, and Charlotte, but don't let the names fool you - these are no Sex in the City-esque ladies who lunch and dish. Their lives and problems would have made Carrie Bradshaw trade in her Jimmy Choos for a rural nunnery.

Even though their lives aren't perfect, the other three still manage to have problems glamorous and interesting enough to match their successful lives. Sarah, on the other hand, is a floundering wreck, her problems the products of self-absorption and a frustrating inability to make good life choices.

And that's the biggest problem with Girls in Trucks. Because Sarah sees herself as mediocre, plain, and a failure, the reader will, too. And while I found myself rooting for every tertiary character in the book, I couldn't root for Sarah because I knew she'd find a way to defeat herself no matter how promising her prospects. There are lovable losers, and then, there are just losers.

Still, I read the book in a single sitting (or rather, during a long day of subway connections and doctor's office waiting rooms), and really enjoyed Crouch's descriptions of debutante culture and social class hierarchies in the South.

If you like...: books about southern life and love like Garden Spells by Sarah Addison Allen, or books about women who just can't seem to get it together like The Man of My Dreams by Curtis Sittenfeld, this book is for you.

Everette Maddox Website Returns!

The Poetry of Everette Maddox, an online reference to the life and work of New Orleans's eternal poet laureate is back up and running.

The site includes the complete text of hard to find Maddox poems from the increasingly rare and pricey Everette Maddox Song Book, as well as his later titles.

Even more exciting are the audio files of interviews and poetry readings, tribute poems, letters, and a good bit more.

Three cheers to Tom Woolf for compiling this truly awesome site. And to those of you who wonder why we never shut up about Maddox here, you can finally see for yourself.

Glorious Grits from Termite Hall

We've written about this book before, but now that we've had time to try out a few recipes it seemed like a good time to revisit it. Termite Hall is full of the author's signature wit and charm - and it's a heckuva read for a cookbook - but we'd hate to mistake the garnish for the main course.

Though we've only made a handful of dishes to date, each has been a winner. Granted, we've studiously avoided some of the more esoteric dishes - I'm pretty sure I can die happy having never tasted aspic - but the more gelatinous courses are definitely in the minority.

Of the recipes we've tried, my favorite by far is the first one we made: grits and corn pudding. We followed Eugene's advice and fried up some sausage and pears (with a little brown sugar added), and then served them over the pudding. It was nineteen kinds of awesome. And better still, the next morning we hauled out the cast-iron skillet and made fried grits with the leftovers. And that, friends, was good eatin'.

So, we thought we'd share - bon appétit!

Grits and Corn Pudding from Eugene Walter's Delectable Dishes from Termite Hall.

Cook 1 cup grits in 4 cups water, 1 tsp. salt, stirring constantly. When grits come away from side of pan, remove from fire, let cool awhile. Add 1/2 cup milk, tin of creamed corn, tablespoon unsalted butter, pinch of salt, dash of cayenne as well as freshly-ground black pepper. Add one cup grated sharp cheese. Fold in thoroughly 3 beaten eggs, pour into buttered casserole, dot top with pea sized dabs of butter. Bake in moderate oven 30 or 40 minutes or until knife comes out clean. Good with pork sausage and fried hard pears for Sunday brunch.

Dang. Now I'm hungry.

Shall We Sup, Shall We Soup?: Two More from the Inimitable Eugene Walter

Jennie the Watercress Girl: A Fable for Mobilians and a Few Choice Others

Delectable Dishes from Termite Hall: Rare and Unusual Recipes

If Everette Maddox is the unofficial poet laureate of the blog, Eugene Walter is its resident Puck. We're big fans, and when Brady returned from his research trip to the Gulf Coast, he brought me back two hard-to-find Eugene Walter reprints.

Walter's first book, Jennie the Watercress Girl was an effort to revive the lost art of pamphleteering. After returning to Mobile from Alaska, where he worked as a cryptographer during World War II (well-documented in Milking the Moon: A Southerner's Story of Life on This Planet), he discovered the city had much changed in his absence. And not for the better.

This playfully illustrated little fable begins when Jenny Heynonny's family is ruined by the 1929 stock market crash, and little Jennie resolves to support them by selling watercress. And so, she departs for Bienville Square singing the refrain:

"Watercress, watercress, who'll buy my watercress?
Watercress sweet and shy,
Watercress wet and dry,
Oh, who'll of my watercress, watercress buy?"

Here, she befriends all the town characters, talking critters, too, and discovers her true calling as a ballet dancer. After years on tour, she returns to Mobile to find that the city has embarked on a course of PROGRESS. The trees are gone, the architecture is bad, and the pretty corners of the city are now littered with parking lots and filling stations.

And Jennie's heart is utterly, irreparably broken.

Of course, no city plots its course by broken-hearted ballerinas, or by the druthers of Eugene Walter; however, even today, Mobile has an interesting relationship with its quirky side. Though surrounded by suburban wasteland and industrial sprawl, in the core of the city you'll find cars sporting "Keep Mobile Funky" bumper stickers, independently owned shops, and historic preservationists who laugh in the face of termites and hurricanes. Starbucks only came to Mobile recently, and even its walls are plastered with local art.

So, maybe Eugene accomplished a little something after all.

A good bit giddier than the fate of poor Jennie is Delectable Dishes from Termite Hall, perhaps the most charming cookbook ever to grace my shelves.

Termite Hall, another marvel of Mobilian historic preservation, still stands despite its name. And Eugene wrote of it, "The Hall has always been a place where people came for a week's visit and stayed a year, where everybody read and ate, ate and read, and listened to music and danced and painted pictures and climbed trees and ate and gardened and read and ate. Naturally, it is haunted, delightfully so."

And so the cookbook begins with a ghost story, which is worth the price of admission alone.

Then, the recipes. It's rare to read a cookbook by a writer, and there probably has never been one by a writer who was so much fun to read as Eugene Walter. He manages a kind of playful 19th century elegance, with a healthy dose of southern vernacular thrown in as well. One recipe calls for "8 big fat sassy ripe tomatoes," but I fell in love on the first page, a recipe for a "Clear Soup of Greens." After his instructions for the broth, Eugene writes:

"Into this you can toss shredded lettuce, or young cabbage, or watercress, or baby collards, or baby mustard greends, or baby radish leaves (Yes, I did say radish!) or spinach or half spinach and half young sorrel leaves or whatever greens you fancy... Pretty and Very Good. With croutons or dumplings such a dish takes on resonance."

When he gave me the books, Brady pointed out the title of the second chapter, "Shall We Sup, Shall We Soup?" and said, "I saw that, and I thought that you and Eugene probably would have been great friends."

This may be the best compliment I have ever received.

Southern-Fried Magical Realism: Garden Spells by Sarah Addison Allen

Garden Spells by Sarah Addison Allen

Every once in awhile, I come across a book that doesn't appear to have a lot to recommend it, yet for some reason, I am helpless to resist its charms. From Bridget Jones's Diary, which all but the dour can agree on, to Raymond Chandler's The High Window, which I seem to be alone in preferring to all other Chandler books, sometimes knowing that a book is good-not-great takes all the pressure off. It's truly pleasure reading. Along those lines, Garden Spells didn't shake the very foundations of my belief system, but I had a very hard time putting it down. Its charms are considerable.

Claire Waverly is a 34-year-old emotionally stunted caterer whose meals have strange effects on those who eat them, while her elderly cousin, Evanelle, feels compelled to give people things they'll need later -- sometimes it's a box of Pop Tarts, sometimes it's a box of condoms. And then there's Sydney, the wild younger sister who left town after high school like something out of a Warrant video, and shows up on Claire's door ten years later with her six-year-old daughter and a pile of big secrets.

The two sisters have never been close, and most of the book centers around their efforts to piece together some kind of relationship out of their wreck of a childhood together. The subplots, however, are what give the book its momentum. Some work, like the story involving local sexpot Emma Matteson, who believes that Sydney has come back to town to reclaim her old flame, now Emma's husband. It's a nicely realized character study about adults who never really leave high school.

Sweet, though less successful are the book's love stories. There's the burgeoning relationship between the awkward Claire and her art professor next-door-neighbor, the gay grocery store owner struggling to win back his long-time partner, and the oddly matched Sydney and her childhood friend, Henry, a farmer. It's through these relationships that it becomes clear that the characters and their motivations are not as well developed as they might be.

That said, it's an exceptionally pleasant book to read, and the folksy, slightly magical lull of small town life is enchanting and irresistible.

If you're looking for a less edgy Dorothy Allison, or heck, even a less edgy Lee Smith, or if you like the food-magic of Laura Esquivel's Like Water for Chocolate, this book is for you.

The Devil and Henry Walker: Mr. Sebastian and the Negro Magician by Daniel Wallace

Mr. Sebastian and the Negro Magician by Daniel Wallace

I'm wracking my brain, but when it comes to U.S. writers of magical realism, I can only think of one: Daniel Wallace.

There's something about the fact that his books are set in the American South that makes the appearance of circus freaks, witches, and fertility rites almost entirely believable. If Robert Johnson can sell his soul to the Devil at the crossroads, it makes sense that a 10-year-old boy can sell his in exchange for magic.

Like Wallace's first novel, Big Fish, Mr. Sebastian and the Negro Magician is about the mysterious life of a complicated man, and the struggle to tease out the truth from the tall tale. Though it's a less successful novel than Big Fish, Wallace sets up an irresistible premise here.

The book begins on May 20, 1954, when Henry Walker the Negro Magician, is led away from the circus where he performs by three violent teens who mean him no good, and disappears.

Well no, actually, the book begins with a letter to an unknown party from someone named James, explaining how he tracked down Henry's friends to learn about his final years.

But really, the book begins with a young boy who lives in a grand hotel with his sister and his father, the hotel janitor. And then, one day, he meets the Devil in Room 702 and sells his soul in order to become a great magician. But the Devil takes something else, too. One day while performing a magic show for his father, Henry makes his sister, Hannah, vanish. Only he can't make her reappear again.

And the book also begins when Henry Walker becomes a Negro Magician who isn't actually black.

So, what's the real story? Wallace gradually unfolds Henry's life through journal entries, stories told by circus folk, newspaper clippings, and the investigations of a private detective. Each one brings the reader a little closer to the truth, but in the end, many questions go unanswered. In fact, the last chapter slams to a halt so abrupt that I paged past the acknowledgments, not quite believing that there wasn't a conclusion lurking around somewhere between them and the author bio.

That's not a completely bad thing. In fact, I suppose it's the whole point.

Henry Walker is a man who walks along the boundaries of life and death, black and white, illusion and reality, magic, the Devil, and hard, ugly, truth. What it makes him, however, is a bit of a void. And while Wallace makes it clear that he's done this purposefully, Henry isn't an easy character to deal with as a reader. And while I understand the necessity of leaving some questions unresolved, the manner in which Wallace chooses to do so is not entirely satisfactory.

Still, I wonder if I'd still feel this way if I read the book over again. Which, despite my criticisms, I may actually do.

I Sure Am Using the Word Bildungsroman a Lot Today, But If the Genre Fits. . .

Eugene Walter won the Lippincott Award for The Untidy Pilgrim, his first novel. Its opening lines are often quoted, at least around certain parts:

"Down in Mobile they're all crazy, because the Gulf Coast is the kingdom of monkeys, the land of clowns, ghosts and musicians, and Mobile is sweet lunacy's county seat."

The novel follows our protagonist - who isn't named, so I'll just call him "Fosdick," which I stole from Horatio Alger, who really has a way with names - from his family home in central Alabama down to the coast, where folks are "Frenchified," and thus (he has been told) not to be trusted. It's good, if ultimately useless, advice, because it doesn't take long before our hero is drinking in unsavory dens, carousing with all manner of eccentrics, and falling in love with his uncle's (much younger) wife.

A surprising amount of the book is taken up with sittin' and visitin', eating and drinking, and the telling of outlandish stories/really good gossip about relatives who never actually appear in the book. This is more charming than you might think. The repartee is witty, the eccentrics truly eccentric, and the prose bops along breezily (although a face-saving side trip to New York after a speakeasy punchout does slow things down a bit).

In short, The Untidy Pilgrim is ribald, witty, and altogether refreshing, especially when you set it alongside the Falknerian school of Southern Gothic gloom'n'doom. It's like the sherbert course of Southern Lit...

...if sherbert were surprisingly healthsome to the brain and soul, moreso even than broccolli. . .

...which, I suspect, the author would suggest is often the case.

Not Just an Arcade Fire Album, You Know

John Kennedy Toole, The Neon Bible:

Okay, so Confederacy of Dunces it ain't. But it's not trying to be, either. This slim little novel, written by Toole when he was sixteen and published posthumously, brings to mind To Kill a Mockingbird or the stories of Peter Taylor, and if it isn't the equal of his other novel, well, he wrote it when he was sixteen. Unless you are, like, Salman Rushdie or Milan Kundera or something, I'm guessing you hadn't written a novel by then, so: Quiet, you.

It's a Southern Gothic bildungsroman, set during and immediately after WWII, and the rhythm of the book is slow and languorous. Breaking up monotony (the protagonist's, not ours) are revivals, bounders, fallen women singing the devil's music, and increasingly dire times at home. It does, to be fair, get a little draggy in places but then again: sixteen. By the end of the book you can see Toole's future novel peeking out from underneath the prose.

I've heard it said that Neon Bible is only for Toole completists, but I'd disagree. It doesn't have the go-for-broke insanity of Confederacy, and it unearths very little new ground as far as "Small-Southern-Town-Coming-of-Age" stories go, but it's a charming little book and manages to pull off a child protagonist without descending into mawkish sentimentality.*

Also? SIXTEEN, man. Jeez.

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* Of course, when your family is so poor you cut up old clothes for curtains, and you're pretty much eating dirt for dinner to stave off the hunger pangs, it's a little hard to be that all that sentimental about it.

I Have to Read This

Once, at a departmental dinner party, the date of a faculty member jokingly asked me, upon hearing that I'm from Alabama, "So are you in the Klan or what?".

It was so funny I forgot to laugh.

This is why I think that I need to read Roy Blount, Jr.'s new book as soon as possible.

Something for Everybody

- Atul Gawande's new book, Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance is as good, if not better, than its predecessor, Complications. Standouts include "The Score," an essay about innovations in the area of childbirth; "The Bell Curve," about what separates an average hospital treatment center from an excellent one; and "What Doctors Owe," a piece about malpractice.

- As we come to that beach reading time of year, may I direct you, gentle readers, to the work of Ken Follett? As a teenager, I came to Follett's books for the ubiquitous dirty bits, but stuck around for the taut pacing, high adventure, and well-researched historical settings. On my travels last week, I re-read Pillars of the Earth, a 1000-page behemoth about cathedral-building, corrupt bishops, pillaging earls, and a prior who's crazy like a fox. That I finished it in a L.A. to Pittsburgh round-trip speaks both to Follett's skill as a writer and just how badly the airline messed up my flight (in the form of a 5-hour layover in Detroit).

- My review for the new (and sadly, last) Larry Brown novel, A Miracle of Catfish is up at PopMatters. A great book from a much-missed writer.