The Clearing by Tim Gautreaux

The Clearing is not a book to go to if you're looking for fast-paced action or a driving narrative. It's got a slowly creeping sense of dread, but this will go down best if you're willing to accept its leisurely pace between horrific violences. It grows, slowly, until it reaches a flashover point. And at that point, no one can go back.

Deep in the swamps of Louisiana, where a lumber camp has been erected to process the cypress trees of the area, the older son of a lumber baron is discovered enforcing the law in a rough settlement rife with drinking and gambling. He disappeared after the First World War, leaving his family and future profession behind.

The younger son is sent to run that camp and mill, and, in theory, convince his brother to come home and shape the hell up. He finds a wet and dirty camp, with few amenities and few graces. His wife follows him, first to New Orleans, and then to the little camp of Nimbus. Notably, she does not freak out at the dirt, or the squalor, or the roughness. For that alone, I would thank Tim Gautreaux greatly.

All his female characters are as rich as the male ones, if fewer in supply. Which, in the homosocial surroundings of a lumber camp, is fitting. Ella, the woman who married the damaged Byron, and stays with him through Victrola-and-alcohol binges, is rougher than the family she married into, but has her own reasons for putting up with Byron's scars. Randolph's wife, who follows him into the swamp, discovers she quite likes the life in the camp. She attempts to introduce more families and a church, but there is no sniffing or moralizing.

But it's not a simplistic look at the freedom on the frontier. Life in the camp is hard, and the dangers real, both from the surrounding swamp, and the men who are as mean as the alligators there who don't take kindly to By and Rando trying to keep the workers less drunk and belligerent.

And then there is May, Randolph's housekeeper, who has slept at least once with most of the men in the story, but for reasons entirely her own. The child born from this one character knows is his own, yet he can't say that openly. In the end, a father is declared, and the results are healing and painful both.

I haven't even mentioned the tangles with the Mafia yet. While the bar is run by an Italian not directly connected with the mob, the dealer supplied to the bar reports directly to the major crime boss/rum-runner in the area. The decision to shut down the bar on Sundays angers the boss, and this results in a series of deaths, accidental and deliberate both. Byron and Randolph and their families find themselves in the sights of killer, who was himself irrevocably altered by the same war that destroyed By.

Oh, and I just remembered the other thing I wanted to talk about! The other thing about this book that I haven't seen for a long time in the fiction I've read is the careful and sad consideration of the emotional damage caused by killing other human beings. Byron is the most obvious example of this, of course, having come back from the war haunted by what he did and saw there. But it goes further than that. When another character is forced to kill someone in the bar, in self-defence and to save another man's life, when it's the most justified killing could ever possibly be - it still has an impact. The person who did it is now a killer, now has to walk around with that, and it haunts him. It made me realize how much fiction tosses off killings as easy, particularly if they're justified. This book does not.

I enjoyed the complexity of The Clearing, the small movements towards a disaster. It's a book that takes its sweet time, but ah, the moments that are scattered on the way. It's thoughtful, and detailed. I don't know that I loved it, but I liked it quite a lot.

Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner

Its incredibly tempting to start this review with one long run-on sentence, with plenty of punctuation, but no periods, and particularly not apostrophes when youre dealing with words like "dont," but I find refraining from apostrophes incredibly difficult and everything I've written just looks wrong (but this is a hypnotic writing style after you've - dammit! - read it for a while, and to me, sounds like a horse's - I give up! - gallop, although I did find it slightly irritating that every single narrator (there are at least four) has exactly the same long sentences and cadence, which does seem to strain credulity, yet once you get sucked into the writing, it's hard to extricate yourself.)

And that's enough of that. I'm sure I'm not the first reviewer to try that gimmick.

Ah, paragraph breaks, how I've missed you.

It took me quite a while to figure out what I thought of this book, and I'm still not entirely sure. The race and miscegenation issues often made me uncomfortable. This book is obviously exactly what it is, though, and I'm loath to dismiss all of a certain genre of Southern literature, although I am also not willing to give it a free pass. This book is often and overtly racist and misogynist.

What finally really caught and held my attention was the realization of how much this is actually a book about storytelling. As I said, it switches narrators at different parts of the book, and few of them are telling a story they actually observed. Instead, they know the bare bones of what happened, and construct a narrative of what, to them, must have happened. Then, a detail that reframes the entire previous story will be revealed, and someone else will take up the tale. In doing so, the various narrators construct elaborate scenes and characters, and give to them detail and life and quirks, without ever knowing if those scenes occurred, if those characters existed, if anything remotely like what they imagine must have happened did happen.

And so, in a way, instead of being about what happened, it is a story about how people tell stories, about how they make them satisfying to themselves, how stories are constructed and communicated, and how much can be embellished in the telling.

It is also, unmistakably, a story of male desire. The women in the story are mostly ciphers, and even when they want something, they are very rarely given any agency around it, any ability to do anything that might change this story of men. Instead, this story is about men wanting fathers, sons, land, and other men. It is about desires spoken and unspoken, communicated, withheld, and transferred.

All the Sutpens are broiling cauldrons of desire, and for the most part, unattainable desire, or desire briefly won and then lost. And the sins of the father are brought upon the son(s), and spell doom in the end. There is an inexorableness about this book.

And yet, the cry that names the book is a bit of a puzzlement for me. It is a biblical cry of a father mourning for a lost son, a heartwrenching expression of loss. And yet, the father figure in the book seems more interested in the idea of a son than he does in the individual.

As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner

I am feeling totally inadequate to the task of reviewing this book. It's only the second Faulkner I've read, and while I enjoyed Absalom, Absalom, it didn't quite utterly astound me the way this one did.

I was expecting the run-on sentences and outright rejection of periods that I found in the last book. Instead, I found short little chapters, and voices that spoke in terse sentences that only hinted at what lay beneath.

This is the story of Addie Bundren, and what happens to her body after she dies, requesting that her husband, sons and daughter take her to buried in her hometown. It is the story of her husband, shiftless, possessive, prideful, self-reliant, and stubborn. Of her oldest son, Cash, practical, handy, straight-forward. Of her second son, Darl, the one everyone in the neighbourhood worries about - except the overly pious next-door neighbour, who is convinced he is the one son who really loves his mother.

About her third and favourite son, Jewel, who loves his mother, even if he doesn't show it in ways acceptable to that nosy neighbour. Who will take nothing from his father's hand, and finds the only things he does care about bartered without his knowledge. About her daughter, Dewey Dell, in all kinds of female trouble, and with few to help. About her youngest son, Vardaman, who is so traumatized by his mother's death that he becomes convinced she is a fish.

As I Lay Dying is frequently funny. It often made me care about the characters, and then, on a dime, made me so exasperated I could have strangled them. The point-of-view chapters pile one on top of the other, and each new one lays some new meaning on top of what I already understood - how someone had misunderstood someone else, or what one cryptic reference had meant, or a different reason why the misadventures of the Bundren clan were what they were.

Everyone in this book is fucked up. This is revealed, more and more. And Faulkner is both merciless and compassionate as he airs this dirt-poor Southern family's peccadilloes. I have no idea how he manages to achieve both at the same time, but he does.

The chapters frequently have devastating juxtapositions, but my favourite was the one chapter from the dead mother's point of view, about the uselessness of words and the stupidity of those who think that they can explain everything with the next chapter, when a man is riding to her homestead, intent on using his words to explain everything. I won't tell more than that, but coming hard on the heels of Addie's chapter, it tore down everything he said while he said it.

As I Lay Dying is a remarkable achievement. Everyone should read it.