Clemency (review)

Abstract

The Next Step in the Dance by Tim Gautreaux Picador USA, 1998, 340 pp., $23 Paul "T-Bub" Thibodeaux is a mechanic in the small town of Tiger Island, Louisiana, an expert in outdated machinery, happy with his life of drinking, Cajun dancing and the occasional spirited fistfight. Not so content is Colette, Paul's beautiful young wife, whose restless ambition soon draws her away from Tiger Island and her husband. Most of the novel's action concerns the Thibodeauxs ' marital rift and the odd, far-ranging second courtship that follows as Paul attempts to reconcile with Colette. Gautreaux's story becomes almost a comic, Cajun The Grapes of Wrath as a succession of bizarre escapades and unusual entrepreneurships leads the Thibodeauxs to California, then back to their hometown, now ravaged by economic recession Like his excellent 1996 story collection , Same Places, Same Things, Gautreaux 's novel is written with sure wit and an unmatched ear for the speech of rural Louisiana. Gautreaux's writing is both unpretentiously earthy and often thrillingly eloquent. Here is a writer who can make the refitting of ar\ engine as compelling as another author's love or death scene. Unfortunately, as enjoyable as it is in parts, The Next Step in the Dance suffers from a lack of urgency and mo- mentum in its later pages; the novel simply overstays its welcome. The questions of whether the Thibodeauxs will reunite and whether they will persevere through their financial travails cannot quite sustain our interest . Gautreaux's work is not without its inspired moments: a fantastic bayou shooting contest, a night-time nutria hunt, an ingenious attempted murder that will forever alter the reader's view of engine boilers. However, ultimately, The Next Step in the Dance suffers from pacing problems and lacks the edge and the complexity of Gau-treaux's short fiction . The novel moves too easily from poignancy to sentimentality, from vivid evocation to quaint local color, from the rollickingly picaresque to the flatly episodic. This new book wUl be welcome to those already familiar with the author's short fiction, but perhaps his first one is still a better introduction to Gautreaux's considerable talents. QT) Clemency by Colette Inez Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1998, 92 pp., $11.95 In Clemency, her eighth collection of poems, Colette Inez reexamines her past with striking honesty. The first of the three emotionally charged sections in the book begins with her conception. The poems then trace the progression from her early childhood—spent in a Catholic orphanage where her parents, a priest and his student, abandon her at birth and deny her existence—to her later childhood years with an overbearing American caregiver. The section concludes with Inez's return to the houses of her youth in search of peace in place of anger, in order "to sky write CEASE FIRE,/to crowd the house with doves." In the second section, Inez writes of her encounters and correspondence with her father, her mother's 212 · The Missouri Review family, and her mother—a mother who says, "You may write to me,/ not saying who we are." In "My Mother's Counsels" she writes, "I've slept like a rake, cold teeth/pointed to the stars./But never under her hand knit afghans/my head on her pillowy breast, lips/parted and crusted with milk." The poems in the last section are meditations on the poet's present life, her transformation from angry child to accepting adult, that we understand more deeply because of the knowledge imparted in the first two sections. With subject matter this personal , it would be easy for a poet to alienate her reader. Inez's honesty, craftsmanship and diversity of approach are what save these poems and render her confessions more than just palatable. Inez's images are almost tactile in their vividness, and her poems are as well crafted as they are strongly felt. Clemency is a worthy accomplishment. (EC) Pretending the Bed Is a Raft by Nanci Kincaid Algonquin, 1997, 241 pp., $17.95 "Wives are women men are stuck with. Lovers are women men choose. I prefer being chosen," Mona, the lover of a middle-aged English...