SIGNALS
By Tim Gautreaux
363 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $26.95.
Growing up on the prairies, I formed a vision of the American South based almost exclusively on James Dickey’s “Deliverance” — first the 1970 novel and later the 1972 movie, Burt Reynolds heading deep into rural Georgia with three buddies to battle a landscape so bloody and beautiful it seemed an honor just to be there even as they tried desperately to escape. But it was another Dickey book, the sweet love letter to literature “Metaphor as Pure Adventure,” that taught me the pleasures of writing. “One begins with the sensible world, which in its entirety is a gift, and a gift also in each of its parts,” he proclaims. “But there is a second gift that you give yourself, based on the world’s great gift. . . . those pictures of the world inside one’s head; pictures made of the real world but pictures that one owns, that one infuses with one’s own personality. They are fragments of the world that live not with the world’s life but with ours.”
Not long after he wrote that passage, Dickey started teaching poetry at the University of South Carolina. A young Tim Gautreaux was his student, and even the quiet, profound title of Gautreaux’s dissertation, “Night-Wide River,” shows he was listening. Now, nearly 50 years and six books later, Gautreaux’s latest story collection, “Signals,” affirms that he is Dickey’s true heir.
Gautreaux’s stories all begin in the relatively humble territory of realistic fiction. He describes his method, simply, as follows: “I try to imagine a normal, average man, with a old boring job, and give him a problem.” Gautreaux has been called the “cartographer of the Louisiana back roads,” but he also loves machines more than anyone I’ve read: gas stoves, trains, typewriters, sewing machines, pipes, pianos, church bells. It’s one of the chief pleasures of his work — finding out how things function and how to fix them. (Or not: A reader’s heart breaks with Gautreaux’s when something is declared “past fixin’.”)
But the real thrill of this collection is its inevitable march into poetry, what Dickey called “a magical arena.” Gautreaux delivers a reliable, generous, surprising profusion of metaphors in each of these 21 stories. In one, a garage full of junk is slowly revealed as a stand-in for the mysteries of marriage. In another, a windshield breaks into a “million diamonds,” and the man recovering from the crash feels his mind come back to him changed, “like a book dropped in the ocean and washed up on shore, all there, but slightly warped.”
Dickey is not the only Southern writer stalking these pages. The opening story pays explicit tribute to Flannery O’Connor, resurrecting the protagonist of “Everything That Rises Must Converge” as a quiet typewriter repairman who keeps to himself, or tries to. At first, importing this character from the past feels like a risky gimmick, but in time it becomes entirely natural — a decision the protagonist himself seems to have made, wandering over to this other story, in a new century.
With her no-nonsense, amusing take on human nature and her lack of sentimentality, O’Connor influences Gautreaux as much as the dreamy genius Dickey. One cleareyed character remembers his dead mother as “hard to bear, pretentious for a poor woman and full of outdated airs.” Gautreaux’s descriptions are often so precise they’re funny. (Once again, it turns out precision is the way to comedy.) Like O’Connor, Gautreaux admires people who understate their situations. In one story, as an airplane goes down, the pilot’s last words — recorded over the cockpit’s voice recorder — are, “Oh, well.”
In 1945, Dickey wrote that he “came to meet my holy masters in the Word.” In the humble and great problems strewn through Gautreaux’s excellent stories, in his primal forests and his crumbling mansions, in his beautiful and intelligent and ambitious sentences, I find Dickey himself after all these years. He practically shakes my hand. And there is O’Connor too, over by herself, asking us all to please quit making such a big deal of things and tell the story. Gautreaux does them both proud.
Rebecca Lee is the author of “Bobcat and Other Stories.”
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