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17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
brothers battle geography, memory and evil in bayou epic, November 6, 2004
This review is from: The Clearing: A Novel (Paperback)
In Tim Gautreaux' spellbinding novel, "The Clearing," Randolph Aldridge sets out to locate and reclaim his shell-shocked and spiritually lost older brother, Byron. Randolph's odyssey takes him not only to the most remote, primitive and violent region of Louisiana bayou virgin forest, but to the extremities of human nature as well. Randolph, the lumber mill manager, confronts an untouched geographic environment and must also face his worst fears: the primitive qualities of the human heart, an unalloyed fear of death, and his own capacity to comprehend vengeance and to exact it. In its exploration of the consequences of war, of good people's need to be just in the face of withering evil and of the human heart's capacity to love, "The Gathering" is nothing less than brilliant. In search of meaning and purpose, Randolph and Byron are equally lost souls. As the younger brother, Randolph struggles with his place in the family, and he chafes at his subterranean disappointment with his life. His acceptance of his father's demand that he discover the whereabouts of his older brother and be the means of his brother's redemption presents an opportunity to not only discover the definition of manhood, but to become one on his own terms. Randolph's actions, which ultimately involve his own liberation, create a genuine interdependence with Byron. It is Byron's existential despair that gives the novel its power. Ruined by the degradations of World War I, Byron has consciously sought to efface himself from his family and the nation which precipitated his emotional ruin. After reluctantly recounting but one horrific episode of his experiences in the trenches, Byron "stared down...and his face seemed like something carved by wind out of the side of a mountain." As a representative of the "Lost Generation," it is not surprising that Byron has chosen to enforce law and order on a population that, in Gautreaux' capable hands, appears incapable of civilized behavior. As a lawman, Byron's justice is swift, calculated and brutal. He offers no apologies but is fully aware of the human toll his work exacts. As events spiral out of control in the "The Clearing," Gautreaux requires his readers to consider whether good men can overcome the antagonistic influences of geography, post-trauma distress and humans' ability to inflict pain, suffering and disgrace on each other. The novel's deterministic fatalism contrasts sharply with the brothers' understated heroism, and it is this tension between light and dark, degradation and realization that makes the novel a riveting read. We face the "jaundiced anger" of battle-scarred World War I veterans and realize it is only the most delicate of lines which makes one man an amoral, vicious killer and another a despairing, driven lawman. Descriptions of the Louisiana cypress bayou are so meticulous and forbidding that we sweat sympathetically and our hearts palpitate in fear of primordial insects, snakes and alligators. Even those of us committed to non-violence may experience a diminution of belief as Randolph and Byron use whatever means necessary to prevail. At once a powerful narrative and metaphorical allegory, Tim Gautreaux' "The Clearing" reminds us that our best writers squeeze our national character and wring out its essence. Whether his characters are debased or admirable, Gautreaux distills something vital from each. Through his exploration of family, justice and memory, he has given us a true picture of ourselves.
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10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
An Expertly Plotted and Genuinely Engrossing Story, July 25, 2003
If you're looking to fell a cypress tree five feet in diameter, or if you need to incapacitate a man using a shovel, or if you need to pull half of a nightclub into a river using a steamboat, you'll find clear, step-by-step instructions in Tim Gautreaux's second novel, THE CLEARING. Although he certainly doesn't condone such actions, Gautreaux describes them so evocatively and in such detail that you almost suspect he is writing from firsthand experience. He has obviously researched the hell out of this novel, yet, to his credit, those long hours of study never show through in these passages. Instead, these darkly riveting descriptions attest to his storyteller's eye for process, historical verisimilitude, and specific setting. It is also to Gautreaux's credit that these acts of brutality against nature and against humans all have grave costs. The violence he describes in THE CLEARING, albeit gruesome, is never gratuitous, but always instructive, and the alternation between action and consequence propels the plot in a flurry of suspense. The story concerns Randolph Aldridge, a Pennsylvania Yankee who comes to the Nimbus lumber mill in remote Poachum, Louisiana, with dual purposes: to make the mill profitable again and to persuade his runaway brother, Byron, to return to the family in Pittsburgh. The former is easy, since the swampland surrounding Nimbus is rich with virgin cypress wood, but the latter is difficult unto impossible. A veteran of World War I, Byron acts as the mill's constable, breaking up bar fights and scaring off alligators. But his propensity for quick, authoritative violence is unsettling. He has absorbed the horrors of the battlefield and the brutality of the lawless logging camp, and the moral burden has made him remote and hardhearted: "Byron's life was a motionless thing. Most people drifted and reshaped like clouds throughout their lives, pushed along by poverty or wealth, disaster or luck. Byron was a self-contained vessel of sorrow that needed to be broken open." The novel persistently addresses the peculiar morality of violence through the actions of both Aldridge brothers. When a brawl erupts in the mill saloon, Byron stops it by shooting a man dead, claiming that by doing so he had saved the lives of the others who would have been killed. "You know, the angel of death is still an angel," he tells Randolph coldly. Or, as the parish marshal, a wiry, white-haired octogenarian named Merville, remarks, "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?" As the Aldridge brothers escalate a bloody feud with a Sicilian mobster named Buzetti, the question of whether or not violence is justified if it prevents further violence echoes throughout the novel like a rifle report. Gautreaux knowingly shades the dilemma with hard intricacies, suggesting that violence takes a psychological as well as a physical toll on all those involved. Without pushing an ecological or an anti-violence agenda, Gautreaux clearly equates the killing of human beings with the clearing of the cypress forest, and he recognizes the murky morality of each act. In THE CLEARING, many men are killed so that others may lead productive lives, both for the mill and for society in general. Likewise, the trees they cut and ship are, despite the barren landscape they leave behind, an economic necessity, eventually used to build homes, barns, churches, and businesses across the country and to provide comfort and shelter. Ultimately, the uncomfortable implications of this code haunt the novel: "We all guilty, and everybody got a death sentence," observes Merville. Gautreaux describes the felling of men and trees with unflinching precision, but more importantly, he demonstrates by example how to write an expertly plotted, genuinely engrossing, and acutely affecting story about the ways in which violence strips the human heart. --- Reviewed by Stephen M. Deusner
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12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A novel teaming with the hazards of the swamp, July 22, 2003
This novel takes place in the southwest Louisiana of the 1920s, a place at the very end of the virgin cypress era, a region no more tame than a sack plumb full of cottonmouth moccasins. In this tale, Tim Gautreaux's fourth book-length work of fiction, all of the innate wildness and danger of the cypress swamp comes full bore, like a reader's feast of unforgettable words. Two brothers, Byron and Randolph Aldridge, the sons of a Pennsylvania timber baron, go south for different reasons. Byron, a lawman in the fictional Nimbus, is fleeing his memory and his war-torn past, the skull-wrenching effects of World War I service. His younger brother attempts to bring Byron back to the family and to sanity. This attempt, coupled with the hazards of the swamp, crazed sawmill workers, corrupt marshals, and the liquor-running mob, is slowly fashioned into a beautiful piece of work. I will only mention Cormac McCarthy (All the Pretty Horses) in passing. Not mentioning McCarthy would be a mistake, for this book has the beautiful marks of McCarthy's influence on Gautreaux, and the language used throughout the story is at a level on par with McCarthy's inestimable prose. Ultimately, this is a novel about love and lust, place and period that only Gautreaux could write, now at the height of his powers as one of the South's greatest living authors. The Clearing had me involved in a cast of characters far beyond what I'm used to. Believe it or not, I read it on my honeymoon. This says less about me and more about the strength of Gautreaux's novel. A marvelous Louisiana story for our times. I highly recommend this novel. ---------- Reviewed by Dayne Sherman
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