Customer Reviews

No Place, Louisiana

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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

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!

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.

I chose to bring this book with me on a recent trip to Nova Scotia. It was a constant companion during my meals, my walk on the beach, any chance I got, until I finished. And then I was sad to be done. The story has such an underlying universal lesson anyone can appreciate. Talk to the ones you love, learn to hear what they don't say. Put family before material posessions, Make every day meaningful: Thank-you, Martin Pousson!

What a treat, this novel of pierced expectations and longing. Through precise and soaring prose, the author ably renders the whistling flight of human yearning and the earthy depths of disappointment, the transactions between the sexes, between the generations, between cultures. Set against the lush and swampy strains (you can almost hear Bob Dylan's "Man in the Long Black Coat" twanging in the background) of the Cajun South, the reader is afforded an unforgettable journey through the broken and defeated, through the unspoken contracts of family. The Louisiana atmosphere is so rich, you can smell it, taste it. An enlightening cultural education. If you want to read truly excellent prose (which seems harder and harder to locate these days) check out Pousson; the freshness of subject matter goes without saying. Pousson's voice, imbued with compassion and hope, is worth paying close attention to. Already looking forward to another installment.

My experience with literature of the south tends toward the misty, baroque styles fleshed out by Faulker or Tennessee Williams. This book is disarming by travelling the same intense subject matter (Mississippi valley familial discord) through a clear prose that is calculated to appear simple. The appearance is deceptive: the straightforwardness of the prose brings into high relief the disjointed emotional terrain the characters inhabit.

Through the double narration of the two characters (which wonderfully almost never converges) one almost receives the impression that they have written parts of the book themselves, sending notes and passages for the author to assemble and compose. The effect is one of eavesdropping, in a way that never denies one the pleasure, and guilt, of that act. There is also a side effect: that the characters' problems may become your own through this proximity. Although there are times when this assembly of thoughts is not emotionally charged, these instances are few. Overall the book a wonderful read, a fresh approach to the subject matter, an intense character study of rural Louisiana, and a fascinating family fiction.

It moves in quietly, unexpectedly - it sets a mood, like the afternoon before a hurricane blows into town - still, expectant, but crackling with tension - right before the roofs are blown off the houses and all hell breaks lose. "No Place, Louisiana", like the real storm at the film's center, conveys a ferocious and angry energy that is propelled by swift, simple and decisive prose. It is the stunning debut from Martin Pousson, a Louisiana-born writer who falls in line behind the great Southern authors of our time, with a vision of Acadia that is resonant in its every detail.

This is the story of Louis and Nita, the most unlikely match ever made - opposing forces from the start that could only create domestic thunder and lightning when they collide - yet this is a storm that brews quietly for the lentgh of a marriage, bringing forth two childern who get swept up in the quiet rage and stifling madness of two headstrong and stubborn parents.

It is an elegant and well-balanced book, that lets Nita and Louis tell their stories in subtle, shifting perspectes, from one to the next - from their first date, to their wedding, then to their endless search for the perfect house, the perfect neighborhood, the perfect life - from Nita's revultion at letting her husband touch her, to Louis' adoration and longing for his beautiful and distant wife - and finally to their children, a perfect son and a rebellious daughter, who become the battlegroud for their parents unfulfilled desires.

It is a book that looks at the tragedy of the American Marriage, at the gulf that exists between husbands and wives, and between parent and child, while creating a portrait of a time in American history, of the American South, that is perfectly rendered, portraying the poverty and racism along side the beauty and elgance of Cajun language, culture and custom. A true revelation.

This debut novel really creeps up on you in a good way, and it lingers in your thoughts long after you've wended through its final, devastating chapters. Although the writing style is more economical and sparse than in Bastard Out of Carolina, there are many similarities to that classic novel, including its soul-searching female protagonist trying to escape a legacy of abuse amid hardscrabble circumstances and desperate uncertainties.

There's a lot of darkness and grit on display here here, but it's eminently rewarding and never so downbeat that you want to turn away from it. Pousson's memorable heroine Nita is an unforgettable character, richly nuanced, unflinchingly real, completely original, ferociously alive. What I took from Nita and her restless, fidgety family chronicle reminded me of the Stones classic "You Can't Always Get What You Want." You can try sometimes, but you might find...you get what you need.

Kudos to Pousson for also delivering one of the most eye-opening depictions of modern-day Cajun life ever conveyed in a novel. You could call it Southern Gothic but that's almost too easy, and too limiting. He's dealing with far swampier terrain; something short, sharp and shocking that's hard on the soul, but good for it all the same. Cajun living to a fault. And the novel's regional cadences positively sing...

In No Place, Louisiana, Pousson has conjured up a hardscrabble triumph that leaves you thirsty for his next effort.

The characters in Pousson's stunning first novel not only breathe by jumping out from the pages, they suffocate themselves and those around them. A fascinating story that is primarily about a woman, a mother who is losing her mind and the tragic consequesces to those around her as she spirals into madness. A super page turner, the book hooks you and really compells you to read further. Very excited about Pousson's writing. Cant wait for the next one. A real achievement.

Not a being a novel reading kinda guy, when I was handed this book by a friend I was a little anxious I wouldn't be able to get through it. I did. And surprisingly quickly, not because it was a superficial 'light" read, quite the opposite. I found it incredibly interesting and got drawn in by the relationship between the two lead characters. I loved how we get to see the story unfold from both angles. I usually read books on psychology and this book shows, among many things, that there are always two sides to every situation and the constant struggle we all have, conscious or not, with our demons.