Signals

Starred review from October 31, 2016
Gautreaux channels Flannery O’Connor with a soupçon of Elmore Leonard in this collection of stories, many set in Louisiana, most featuring people of Cajun descent sliding down the socioeconomic scale, chasing dreams in a last-ditch effort to escape the nightmare of defeat. The first story, “Idols,” sets the tone with the tale of a typewriter repairman who inherits a rundown mansion. He hires a carpenter (one of several Gautreaux characters—furnace man, exterminator, piano tuner—with a gift for fixing things). This carpenter needs money to pay for removing his tattoos, which his wife calls idols. The home-restoration project stalls when the homeowner runs out of money and the carpenter tattoos. In “Radio Magic,” a renovated radio receives stations worldwide, allowing its owner, another doomed dreamer, to listen to old comedy routines broadcast from the Solomon Islands. “Gone to Water” focuses on an old man navigating through a recent oil spill. “Sorry Blood” portrays an 88-year-old who, unable to remember who he is, digs a ditch for the man claiming to be his son. A priest (“Attitude Adjustment”), a Texas car thief (“Easy Pickings”), and a boy from Kentucky (“Died and Gone to Vegas”) all seem “a few thimbles shy of a quart.” Gautreaux’s landscape is watery, his language fluid, his characters stuck in a world where, as one promising orphan puts it, what would be nice and what will happen are usually two different things. Agent: Peter Matson, Sterling Lord Literistic.

Starred review from November 1, 2016
Facing conflict, Gautreaux's (The Missing, 2009, etc.) working-class characters try to do the right thing in 21 new and selected stories set in Louisiana and elsewhere.Gautreaux's stories--like many of the cantankerous characters in them--exude a sort of grudging optimism about the human condition. In "Deputy Sid's Gift," a nursing home worker calls the police on a homeless man for stealing his truck but slowly experiences a change of heart. "Resistance" is about an old man's attempt to help a neighbor girl with her science project, over her drunken dad's objections. And in "The Furnace Man's Lament," the well-meaning title character takes a recently orphaned teenager under his wing, with an unexpected result. The stories here are often hopeful but never saccharine, thanks in part to Gautreaux's knack for dark comedy. "Sorry Blood" is about an incompetent layabout who kidnaps a confused old man from a Wal-Mart parking lot to help with yardwork before the kidnapper's wife gets home. (The description of the kidnapper, who first appears "eating a pickled sausage out of a plastic sleeve and chewing it with his front teeth," is among the book's many highlights.) In "The Review," a "low-level accountant" goes to extreme lengths to track down the community college professor who gave his debut novel a one-star Amazon review. The only flaw in this fine collection is its length: with so many exemplary stories, the weaker pieces stand out; "Easy Pickings," about a thief's ill-fated attempt at robbing an old woman, and "Died and Gone to Vegas," set over a card game in the engine room of a "government steam dredge," both feel, at times, a bit jokey compared to the other offerings. Still, given the number of superb stories here, this is just a quibble. Gautreaux's deft wit and empathy for his characters make for a winning collection.

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November 15, 2016
This collection by short story writer and novelist Gautreaux (The Missing, 2009) contains an impressive assemblage of new and previously published pieces, set mostly in Louisiana. The wonderful first story, Idols, evokes the finest of southern American authorsWelty and O'Connor, even Faulknerand its two main characters, the typewriter repairman, Julian, and his hired laborer, Obie (the Flem Snopes figure), are memorable. Attitude Adjustment tells of the mentally accident-damaged Father Jim. Wings, like several of these stories, is about the small connections that bind men to objects and, in more subtle ways, to women. Gautreaux writes about ordinary people and simple emotions, but he captures both vividly. A character in The Piano Tuner describes something as both funny and sad at the same time, and that describes these pieces accurately, as well as capturing the foundation of Gatreaux's appeal. This collection could, at last, get Gautreaux the attention he deserves.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)