Amazon.com Review
In Tim Gautreaux's pitch-perfect portraits of rural Louisiana life, there is no force stronger than a good Cajun-style chicken stew--except, perhaps, the vagaries of old age.
Welding with Children has more than its fair share of the latter, beginning with the funny and moving title story, in which a grandfather drives around the four offspring of his four single daughters using what neighbors unkindly call "the bastardmobile." Raised on a steady diet of Icees and daytime talk TV, Bruton's grandkids finally inspire a housecleaning of truly spiritual dimensions, proving the adage that "everything worth doing hurts like hell." Other stories follow a hard-drinking priest sent on a strange errand of automotive atonement, a manic-depressive Creole princess playing cocktail piano in a motel lounge, and a one-armed feminist hitchhiker on a quest for academic tenure:
When a search committee member told me they'd received an application from a gay black female double amputee from Ghana, I reminded the committee that part of my childhood was spent in Mexico, and then I played my last card and came out as a lesbian.... But it did no good. The college found someone more specialized, foreign, and incomplete than I could ever be.
Fair enough. But while most of these tales rely on a certain tried-and-true Southern eccentricity to work their magic, two stories point to what Gautreaux can do when he seeks to do more than just charm. In "Sorry Blood," another old man loses his way--mentally and physically--in a Wal-Mart parking lot. An opportunistic con man poses as his son, then puts the kidnapped "Ted Williams" to work digging a ditch in the sun. Scary, yes, but not as scary as the old man's struggle to hold on to his memory: "This is an egg. What am I?" In the brief and powerful "Rodeo Parole," four inmates play a dangerous waiting game with an enraged bull, spurred on by the knowledge that a rodeo victory means scoring points with the parole board. The bull, after all, is no more or less than their fates, "like a judge saying something and you can't stop it or change it." Gracefully written and spiced with vivid regional detail, these are tales by a master storyteller who's not afraid to blend some darkness into his fictional roux.
--Mary Park
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
The 11 stories in Gautreaux's second collection (Same Place, Same Things) are energized by compassion, perception and antic humor, but occasionally hobbled by didactic dialogue and stilted characters. The title story, however, is a gem, a moving tale more subtly styled than many of the others. It centers on Bruton, a working-class grandfather in Gumwood, La., whose four unmarried daughters drop off their kids, "one each," for him to babysit. He's humiliated when his neighbors call his car the "bastardmobile," and horrified to realize his grandchildren know nothing about moral behavior save for what they've gleaned from TV and their parents' bad habits. Bruton emerges as one of Gautreaux's best-realized characters, a blue-collar Cajun railing against changes in the rules by which he was brought up. "Misuse of Light" is another likable story where sentimentality is skillfully managed. A camera salesman develops a 40-year-old roll of film and unearths a family scandal. "Resistance" depicts the tense interplay between an aging neighbor, a 10-year-old whose science fair project is due, and her sullen, rage-filled father. This dark comedy, like the tale of a priest's struggle with booze, "Good for the Soul," is, however, compromised by a contrived conclusion. The title character in "Dancing with the One-Armed Gal" is a hitchhiker with a whiny monologue about identity politics within academe: she's a women's studies professor who's been fired from her post because, as a one-16th African-American, part Mexican, one-armed lesbian, she wasn't marginal enough, and she's now searching for another affirmative-action position. Other characters in this uneven but often absorbing collection bespeak the author's own compassionate engagement with social and ethical dilemmas; his impulse to moralize, however, may make readers feel manipulated. Agent, Sterling Lord Literistic. (Oct.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
