No Place, Louisiana [Paperback]

Martin Pousson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 1, 2003

Compared to Dorothy Allison and Frank McCourt, debut novelist Martin Pousson has written a masterly portrait of the American Dream gone wrong, set in Louisiana's Cajun country. When marriage to a man with a high school diploma fails to make a waitress's dreams come true, her children become the focus of her fiercest hopes and most damaging desires.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Louisiana-born Pousson debuts with a tightly wound novel about a claustrophobic Cajun marriage. Life in Jennings, La., is no bowl of jambalaya for 16-year-old part-time waitress Nita Morrow when she meets Louis Toussaint on a blind date. Looking to escape her groping stepfather and dead-end existence, Nita marries crude, cheap, car-crazy Louis only to find that her ticket out of town leads to another small town. Nita and Louis make a life together, but not one where he can be the domestic king he imagines or she can even be satisfied. Over the years, Nita succumbs neither to her disapproving mother-in-law nor to her husband's outbursts of machismo. Yearning for something more, she moves her family to successively bigger homes in better neighborhoods. Both husband and wife learn to focus their hopes for the future on their two children, while anger and disappointment with their own lives fester until the inevitable tragedy occurs. Southern family dysfunction is certainly not a new theme, nor is the failure of material wealth to make up for psychological deprivation. Pousson updates these situations with crisp technical adeptness by recounting his story both from Nita's perspective and from Louis's: the date, the wedding, the wedding night, the years that follow. Both husband and wife miss opportunities to deal effectively with feelings or the problems that undermine their happiness, and each injures the other intentionally and unintentionally. Pousson's portrait of discontent is made up of piercing vignettes and Louisiana-inflected dialogue. Setting out to capture the modern South, the first-time novelist confidently eschews the style of a Faulkner or the charm of a McCullers to evoke the prejudices and limitations of Cajun culture in its unique, enriching and destructive complexity. (Mar. 18)Forecast: Fans of Richard Ford and Larry Brown will respond to Pousson's dark perspective and adept prose.

Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

This debut novel should be subtitled "Freud Goes to the Bayou." The plot follows the constricted married life of Nina and Louis, a young working-class couple who have never left the Louisiana parish where they grew up. Nina is only 16 when Louis proposes marriage, but she accepts to escape an intolerable family life and a chastizing stepfather. Of course, they are too young to be aware of each other's sexual or emotional needs. The only feelings they share are a cultural hatred for African Americans and a gladness "that they can throw themselves at the same brick wall." They argue about everything, including how to raise their two children. Nina's complex emotional needs are fulfilled by her aspirations for talented son Marc, abusive behavior toward daughter Jo, and malicious treatment of Louis, who passively works longer hours to avoid any conflict at home. Eventually, the rigorous Southern code of machismo and prejudice that they have inherited from their families comes into conflict with the changing Southern culture during the 1960s. As effectively portrayed by Pousson, the routine of his characters' lives over the years is painful to witness, but the plot is predictable and the characters are not developed adequately to deserve genuine sentiment. A marginal purchase. David A. Beron„, Univ. of New Hampshire, Durham
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Riverhead Trade (April 1, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1573229768
• ISBN-13: 978-1573229760
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.2 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (21 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,090,982 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Unraveling of the American Dream!, May 5, 2003

By 

Joseph J. Hanssen "Joe" (Upstate New York) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: No Place, Louisiana (Hardcover)

Let's face it; usually the reality of our everyday lives is not the fantasy or dream reality of who we really want to be. We hope for the best in life, and sometimes we get it, but most of the time we are disappointed. Pousson is a talented new southern novelist who has painted for us in this story a portrait of conflicting family relations that is a result of a failure to communicate. This is the American dream of a perfect family that is just that, a dream!

Pousson tells us the intense story of Nita and Louis, an unhappily married couple who have two children. They are violently spinning out of control in their relationship because they lack the ability to effectively communicate with one another. Nita's obsessive demands on and abuse of the children is heartbreaking. The constant pressure she places on Louis by demanding he work harder so she can have the life she deserves is selfishly unyielding. She is obsessive about having a better and richer life, while Louis is content with the life they are living. Nita's priorities and perspective on life are very unrealistic for her situation. Is it possible for them to save their marriage and give the children the love they deserve, or are they on an unavoidable downward spiral to a tragic end?

This is not a gay novel. It's to the author's credit as a gay writer that he can write such a compelling and moving story about a heterosexual family in such a realistic fashion. I think the author has the advantage as a gay man of portraying straight characters in a way that they possibly cannot. The result is a story with intense and emotional characters that are unforgettable. What an exciting debut novel, set in Louisiana's Cajun country and embedded in southern reality. This is not to be missed!

Joe Hanssen

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars It's about a real American Family!, November 7, 2002

By 

Jamie Harrold (actor-Erin Brockovich, The Sco... (New York, N.Y. United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: No Place, Louisiana (Hardcover)

I bought this book because I heard that Mr. Pousson's novel was as powerful a debut as Dorothy Allison's or Frank McCourt's. I had no idea how touched I would be, on an emoitional level, after I finished the novel in one sitting! Inspired by the book, I wanted to call every member of my family and say "we must work on our communication,before it is to late!". I am from a small town in central Illinois and found his characters and story surprisingly,universally familiar. The writing is so perfectly fluid and flowing, always moving forward,sometimes subtle- sometimes shocking, but always honestly. He, as a writer, has his own unique signature in every chapter. I simply say this. "Buy this book!" I bought it, and then literally bought several more for each member of my family to read. I cannot wait for Mr. Pousson's next novel!

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Powerful, Seamless Novel of Cajun Family Disintegration, March 6, 2004

By 

"azucarblanca" (San Francisco, CA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: No Place, Louisiana (Hardcover)

Flaring up from the pages of No Place, Louisiana, smoldering matriarch Nita Toussaint is as much a force of nature as she is a woman. In another time and place, Nita would have made a remarkable politician, dictator, or CEO - a la Lady Macbeth, Eva Peron, and Martha Stewart - but in Jennings, Louisiana and its surrounding parishes, Nita will have to build her empire on the backs of her husband and children. Frustrated by the constraints of culture and fueled by the postwar cult of domesticity, Nita's fierce desire to achieve at something and `be someone' hurtles her family towards its inevitable implosion.

Instinctively ambitious Nita, a shrewd, beautiful, high-strung girl of mixed blood from the wrong side of Jefferson Davis parish, finds a ticket out of the swamp with an impulsive marriage to Iota town-boy Louis Toussaint, in whom Nita sees a fertile field for her own insatiable desire to transcend her origins. In rural Lousiana in the 1960s, a woman's advancement was determined by the size of her husband's salary, the square footage of her house, the spotlessness of her counters, and the trophies of her children, and Nita sets about measuring up to snuff with ferocious tenacity, withdrawing over the years into a frightening cycle of rigidity and rage as she grows ever more obsessed with the trappings of status.

Her husband, Louis, no saint either, is himself a prisoner of his place and time. Louis wants desperately to reach out to his own `personal Snow White', yet treats Nita like his most cherished possession, a disastrous approach for a woman who will not be owned by anyone. Aching somehow to express the overwhelming love and tenderness he feels for Nita, the emotionally hapless Louis is constantly missing the fleeting windows into his wife's soul and forever saying the wrong thing, spurring Nita to pull even deeper into an icy carapace.

The most poignant aspect of the book, woven in along with the marital narrative, is the effect of the family dynamic on the two children - clean-cut, overachieving Mama's Boy Marc, and boisterous daughter Jo, whom Nita comes to regard almost as a nemesis. Marc collects as many trophies as Jo does bruises as Nita begins to lose her hold on her rage, yet the silence about the children's lives hangs over the house like an expensive shade canopy, glittering and oppressive in the Bayou heat. Channeling her most fierce desires to succeed into her `perfect' son, Nita visits the same horror onto her children as Louis visits on her, treating them as possessions and as expressions of her own ache to `be somebody, anybody.'

This lyrical novel is as much about the space between words as it is the words themselves. Pousson's seamless and visceral book is a powerful cautionary tale about the loss created by deafening silences. His powerful, immediate prose draws us instantly into the world of this family as it slowly unravels under the weight of the unspoken and the heartbreak of missed opportunities.