Cagey Cajun Tim Gautreaux Writes About What He Knows, And He Knows Human Beings Through And Through

“Same Place, Same Things” By Tim Gautreaux (St. Martin’s, 224 pages, $20.95)

It is a land of cypress swamps and tar-paper shacks, of hot zydeco and cold beer, of characters rich in experience (if in little else) - and a region that Tim Gautreaux clearly knows from the inside out.

South Louisiana. Cajun country. That’s where Gautreaux was born and raised, in a culture marked as much by storytelling as it is by smoky gumbo - and it provides the setting for this astounding, perfectly pitched collection of short stories.

Yet all 12 pieces in “Same Place, Same Things” manage to transcend their physical terrain. Gautreaux writes about the area he knows best, but ultimately it’s the deepest reaches of the human heart he’s plumbing. And if you don’t find his characters among the most unforgettable you’ve ever encountered, I’ll be amazed.

Gautreaux, who has taught creative writing at Southeastern Louisiana University for many years, was recently named John and Renee Grisham Southern Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi. Though his work has been widely anthologized, this is his first collection.

In it, he writes about ordinary, working-class men and women whose lives have been disrupted by extraordinary events. There’s the woman fixing a tractor when a young soldier lands a helicopter in her back field; the widower who has suddenly learned he must raise an infant granddaughter alone; the drunken engineer whose chemical train jumps its track and causes a devastating disaster.

Each story is finely crafted and infused with Gautreaux’s lyrical prose. The sky is “as hard and expressionless as a pawnbroker’s face,” blackbirds soar from the bushes “like a thrown handful of gravel,” late-season fireflies wink on the lawn “like the intermittent hopes of defeated people.”

In “Navigators of Thought,” we meet a tugboat crew made up of unemployed professors who pore over manuscripts about Byron and Nietzsche between calls.

“Sometimes I think we think too much,” one muses. “Thought is life,” another responds. By story’s end, it’s sadly clear which man is right.

In “Waiting for the Evening News,” the drunken engineer - a man who always felt invisible, and now finds his face on the TV news “imagines voices all over America saying, ‘Is that the best he could do after fifty years?”’

In “The Bug Man,” an exterminator who moves unseen through the homes of his customers finds himself crossing the line that separates their lives from his - and pays dearly for his intrusion.

My two favorite stories are masterpieces of grace and understatement, reminders of what is most precious in human life and what, finally, we owe one another.

“Deputy Sid’s Gift” tells of a former oil field worker, now ministering to the “babies” in an old folks’ home, who finds his epiphany when a pathetic drunk steals his truck.

“The Courtship of Merlin LeBlanc” chronicles the awakening of an emotionally crippled man whose daughter dies and leaves him to raise her infant daughter. Merlin has no idea what to do; he gives the baby shotgun shells to play with, hits the bars seeking a woman to help out - until his ancient grandfather points the way toward taking responsibility … and yes, showing love.

“Tell her about dogs and salesman,” the old man admonishes. “… Tell her about worms and bees. … About cooking and cars and poker and airplanes.”

Tell her, in other words, about life in all its terrible and glorious complexity.

That’s just what Gautreaux has done in “Same Place, Same Things,” with an exquisitely expressed tenderness and hopefulness that puts him in the top ranks of up-and-coming writers.

Remember his name. For you will never be able to forget his stories.