Rating: 
Summary: Sinking in the mire.
Review: "The Clearing" is a powerful, engrossing novel set in a remote logging camp deep in the treacherous, snake-infested, alligator-ridden cypress swamps of the Louisiana bayou. Intensely atmospheric, the reader's senses are saturated by Gautreaux's evocation of a humid, fetid, waterlogged, hell-hole of a place teeming with mosquitoes, stinkbugs, cottonmouth moccasins and other nasties. Enclosing the Nimbus lumber mill clearing is the eerie, murky swampland, the swamp in turn steaming, flooding or frozen. This god-forsaken backwater provides the backdrop for the suspenseful, expertly plotted story of the re-uniting of two brothers, Randolph and Byron Aldridge, sons of Noah Aldridge, timber tycoon - and the re-affirmation of the bond that had always existed between them.The year is 1923 and Byron has returned from the 1st World War damaged and disillusioned, sickened and traumatised by the mass-slaughter in the trenches (one harrowing section graphically describes his horrifying experience). Remote and withdrawn, disconnected from his family, uncaring about his own future, hardened and stripped of feeling by exposure to violent death, sinking in the mire of "profound melancholy", his mind is full of festering thoughts of the horrors of war he has witnessed thousands of miles away in France. Drifting from job to job, Byron is now the lawman in the Nimbus logging camp meting out his own harsh brand of rough, tough justice to drunken, brawling, razor-swinging mill-hands and loggers, black and white alike. "Separated from everything by mud and trees", this motley crew of ruffians burn off steam by turning to the only saloon in camp for the solace afforded by alcohol, gambling and hookers as their only form of respite from the gruelling, back-breaking slog ("the daylong swinging of saws") of cutting down the cypress trees - with heatstroke, malaria, snake-bites, predatory 'gators and severed fingers ever present dangers. A more potent, sinister challenge to Byron's law in Nimbus is posed by a ruthless Sicilian group who control the saloon (and its rich pickings) that he is threatening to close on Sundays. A savage, violent power struggle ensues, though Gautreaux never allows gratuitous violence to creep in. At the start of the novel, Byron's whereabouts have been discovered by the family and Noah authorises the purchase of Nimbus lumber mill, appointing Randolph as mill manager to exploit its rich potential by clearing the swampland of irreplaceable cypress forest of a thousand years standing but more so to re-engage with Byron, "a self-contained vessel of sorrow that needed to be broken open" and shepherd him back into the family fold. For those readers who wish to dig deeper, themes of violence, the futility of war, the destruction of the environment, racism, loss and the redemptive power of love are there to be explored. For instance, Merville, the octogenarian district lawman ponders whether killing is justified if it prevents further killing: "It's a sin to kill, but what if I don't kill one, and that one kills two or three? Did I kill that two or three?" Similarly, can the destruction of a natural habitat, the virgin cypress forest be justified on the grounds that, notwithstanding the devastated landscape, "a plateau of stumps", left behind by the clearance, the cut-down trees are ultimately used to construct buildings that people live, work and worship in. "The Clearance" is an excellent novel that opens a window to a bye-gone age. Highly recommended!
Rating:
Summary: GAUTREAUX REALLY WAS LISTENING...
Review: ...when he sat around those old fellows talking about the horrors they witnessed and experienced first-hand in World War I. He expresses his thanks to them - and to several others, including his father - on his acknowledgements page at the first of this, his second novel. It's obvious that he listened not only with his ears and his mind, but with his heart and his spirit - for he has taken what he learned from them and written an incredibly moving novel that conveys not only the historical facts surrounding the lives of those who passed through those times, but the indelible marks left on their souls as well. As in the case of those who fight in any war - or those who are traumatized in some other way - those lives are forever marked and changed. There is no going back to make things easier or different - there can only be a grappling with the past in order to make sense of it, to make it fit somehow within the context of the life lived since those events occurred. There is also - as is the case with just about everything I've read by Gautreaux - a strong sense of family that pervades this story. There are ties that exist between family members that friendship, no matter how deep and enduring, can never equal - even in the case of estrangement, as in the story he tells here. The is great love along with desperation to be seen in the efforts of Randolph Aldridge and his father to find and bring back into the family fold Randolph's wandering brother Byron, damaged beyond imagining by his experiences in France during the war. Randolph finds Byron working as a constable in a rough, almost completely uncivilized lumbering operation deep in the Louisiana woods, then goes there after his family buys the mill to manage it and gently but firmly draw Byron back from the dark brink on which he has been living. There's a lot of violence in this novel - but the setting is a violent one, and there's no getting around that aspect of the story. Rather than glorify it, Gautreaux wisely chooses to present it vividly as the dark force it is - and he pits his characters' basic goodness and strengths against it in an attempt to turn its ugly tide. In doing so, he shows us that sometimes violence is necessary to combat violence - a hard lesson, but one that should be considered by everyone. The anguish experienced by his characters - in particular, Randolph - in dealing with this force is portrayed in a very moving, believable manner, a tribute to Gautreaux's talent and style. When I wrote my review of his first novel, THE NEXT STEP IN THE DANCE, I mentioned that between it and his short fiction, I preferred his stories. With the publication of THE CLEARING, I can say that - at least for me - Gautreaux has taken a big step forward. The story - as well as the characters - in this second full-length work is deeper and more well-developed than in the first. He's an extremely talented writer - he deserves wider attention.
Rating:
Summary: GAUTREAUX REALLY WAS LISTENING...
Review: ...when he sat around those old fellows talking about the horrors they witnessed and experienced first-hand in World War I. He expresses his thanks to them - and to several others, including his father - on his acknowledgements page at the first of this, his second novel. It's obvious that he listened not only with his ears and his mind, but with his heart and his spirit - for he has taken what he learned from them and written an incredibly moving novel that conveys not only the historical facts surrounding the lives of those who passed through those times, but the indelible marks left on their souls as well. As in the case of those who fight in any war - or those who are traumatized in some other way - those lives are forever marked and changed. There is no going back to make things easier or different - there can only be a grappling with the past in order to make sense of it, to make it fit somehow within the context of the life lived since those events occurred. There is also - as is the case with just about everything I've read by Gautreaux - a strong sense of family that pervades this story. There are ties that exist between family members that friendship, no matter how deep and enduring, can never equal - even in the case of estrangement, as in the story he tells here. The is great love along with desperation to be seen in the efforts of Randolph Aldridge and his father to find and bring back into the family fold Randolph's wandering brother Byron, damaged beyond imagining by his experiences in France during the war. Randolph finds Byron working as a constable in a rough, almost completely uncivilized lumbering operation deep in the Louisiana woods, then goes there after his family buys the mill to manage it and gently but firmly draw Byron back from the dark brink on which he has been living. There's a lot of violence in this novel - but the setting is a violent one, and there's no getting around that aspect of the story. Rather than glorify it, Gautreaux wisely chooses to present it vividly as the dark force it is - and he pits his characters' basic goodness and strengths against it in an attempt to turn its ugly tide. In doing so, he shows us that sometimes violence is necessary to combat violence - a hard lesson, but one that should be considered by everyone. The anguish experienced by his characters - in particular, Randolph - in dealing with this force is portrayed in a very moving, believable manner, a tribute to Gautreaux's talent and style. When I wrote my review of his first novel, THE NEXT STEP IN THE DANCE, I mentioned that between it and his short fiction, I preferred his stories. With the publication of THE CLEARING, I can say that - at least for me - Gautreaux has taken a big step forward. The story - as well as the characters - in this second full-length work is deeper and more well-developed than in the first. He's an extremely talented writer - he deserves wider attention.
Rating:
Summary: Superb read.
Review: A stunning novel of brotherly love and bestial brutality in 1923 Louisiana. Byron Aldridge, the sunny son of a Pennsylvania lumber mill magnate, returns from the Great War one of the walking wounded. He soon disappears and is finally found after several years working as the company constable at a cypress swamp sawmill near New Orleans. The grieving father buys the mill and sends his younger son, Randolph, to manage it and try to lure Byron back. What he finds is a fetid hellhole of chaos and violence ruled over by his grim, half mad brother, who stoically beats and shoots, indifferent to risk. Randolph tries to bring some order to the place and soothe and gentle his brother. But they are both menaced by a vengeful Sicilian gangster. This is but the bare bones of a complex, compelling story told in prose so exquisitely evocative that the reader is hard-pressed whether to tarry and savor it or rush onward to devour the feast. Either way it is a rare, rare treat.
Rating:
Summary: a classic
Review: belongs on a short shelf with Cold Mountain and All the Pretty Horses. a mythic story told in muscular prose that builds to a dark climax and a cresendo of resonating themes about family and the natural world. Believe the hype. Novel of the year.
Rating: 
Summary: Lacking...
Review: First off, I should mention that Tim Gautreaux is one of my favorite short story writers. However, it seems his sense of humor, strong command of language, creativity, and purposeful pace lack in his novels. This is a good story, the situation and scene are intriguing, but I can't help feeling Mr. Gautreaux could have written a couple of outstanding short stories from this material instead of a rather dull novel.
Rating:
Summary: Writing can't disguise the weakness of the plot
Review: Gatreaux knows how to write. You can flip the book open to any page and pull out something worth reading aloud and for that alone, I'd take my hat off to the man. But beneath the distracting beauty of the prose is a very familiar story. A good man returned from a bad war in a small town with a dark side, in this case, Sicilian gangsters, including the worst of the worst, a one eyed knifeman. Sound familiar? It is. Gatreaux is at his best when he's wrapped in descriptions of the little lumber town called Nimbus, but the characters who populate it are prone to portentuous talk and symbolic actions. We have riffs on Greek myths, serpents in beds, man mountains engaged in knife fights in rivers, but I found little to persuade me from the thought that Gatreaux was bluffing with a weak hand. Namely, that at the center of the novel, lie a pair of brothers that he doesn't seem to have a handle on. The war veteran has apparently killed scores of men, so that he is accustomed to doling out death in close quarters, yet over 95% of men in World War One were killed through shelling or machine guns, both distant intervention. It was this, the blindness of fate, that you couldn't see who you were killing, or who was killing you, that was responsible for much of the pressure described as shell shock. Gatreaux's veteran comes across then as a mythic figure, but the author seems to want us to believe in the grit and truth of his town. I found it ultimately impossible, when I couldn't believe in the grit and truth of his characters, leaving the book with a hollow beauty, disappointing despite the promise.
Rating:
Summary: Writing can't disguise the weakness of the plot
Review: Gatreaux knows how to write. You can flip the book open to any page and pull out something worth reading aloud and for that alone, I'd take my hat off to the man. But beneath the distracting beauty of the prose is a very familiar story. A good man returned from a bad war in a small town with a dark side, in this case, Sicilian gangsters, including the worst of the worst, a one eyed knifeman. Sound familiar? It is. Gatreaux is at his best when he's wrapped in descriptions of the little lumber town called Nimbus, but the characters who populate it are prone to portentuous talk and symbolic actions. We have riffs on Greek myths, serpents in beds, man mountains engaged in knife fights in rivers, but I found little to persuade me from the thought that Gatreaux was bluffing with a weak hand. Namely, that at the center of the novel, lie a pair of brothers that he doesn't seem to have a handle on. The war veteran has apparently killed scores of men, so that he is accustomed to doling out death in close quarters, yet over 95% of men in World War One were killed through shelling or machine guns, both distant intervention. It was this, the blindness of fate, that you couldn't see who you were killing, or who was killing you, that was responsible for much of the pressure described as shell shock. Gatreaux's veteran comes across then as a mythic figure, but the author seems to want us to believe in the grit and truth of his town. I found it ultimately impossible, when I couldn't believe in the grit and truth of his characters, leaving the book with a hollow beauty, disappointing despite the promise.
Rating:
Summary: great stuff
Review: I agree with the other reviewers who said that this is a great, evocative, and fascinating novel. The story is compelling and the writing is taut. I read it in one weekend. I loved the historical details. You really feel like you're right there in the timber camp in the twenties.
Rating:
Summary: great stuff
Review: I agree with the other reviewers who said that this is a great, evocative, and fascinating novel. The story is compelling and the writing is taut. I read it in one weekend. I loved the historical details. You really feel like you're right there in the timber camp in the twenties.
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