Understanding Tim Gautreaux

In Understanding Tim Gautreaux, Margaret Donovan Bauer presents the first book-length study of the Louisiana storyteller, who injects a seldom heard Cajun voice into southern literature and offers a rare optimistic vision among other contemporary writers of the blue-collar American South.Bauer surveys Gautreauxas three novelsaThe Next Step in the Dance, The Clearing, and The Missingaand two collections of short fictionaSame Place, Same Things and Welding with Childrena to indentify his major themes, character types, and structures. She views his chief contribution to southern letters to be an authentic insideras view of Cajun culture, one resulting in a skillful, realistic, and sympathetic vision of historical and contemporary Acadiana in flux. Bauer addresses how Gautreauxas hopeful vision distinguishes him from his fellow Catholic writer Flannery OaConnor and from other contemporary writers of the blue-collar South such as Larry Brown and Dorothy Allison. She also views Gautreauxas distinctive approach to fiction as contrasting significantly with that of the heirs to the Faulknerian tradition of bearing the burden of an ever-present past. Instead Gautreauxas poor white protagonists are action-oriented characters who, while trapped by circumstances, still strive to affect positive change in their hardscrabble surroundings.