Waiting for the Evening News By Tim Gautreaux, Sceptre, £8.99
The Deep South of the US is not at the top of many people’s holiday lists, and this collection is unlikely to lead to a posse beating a path to Pine Oil, Louisiana. This, though, is a region, and an attitude, that is an intrinsic part of our notion of the US and what it represents.
Tim Gautreaux was born and raised in these here parts, and he mines his homeland for endless stories and anecdotes. This is an elegant, intricate two-hander: terrifically concise and beautifully detailed language and descriptions throw their borders around razor-sharp dialogue, loaded with meaning and wisdom, spoken by folks brought up in hard-scrabble farms that lie down barely trodden country paths.
These stories feel timeless, and there is a terrific sense that here, in this American frontier, very little changes and that the world outside struggling farmsteads, call-in radio shows and bars playing country music on bleary dance floors is making no inroads.
The combined weight of the minutiae in these stories makes the collection monumental. Although there are no obvious plot crossovers, a seamless consistency is at play, each story gently ticking against the thematic inner workings of the next. An engineer inadvertently causes a railway disaster and attempts to lie low; a pump repair man finds a dead farmer and attempts to shake off his widow; a ship’s crew swap stories black as tar below deck over a cut-and-thrust game of cards; a father caring for his newly orphaned grand-daughter gets fresh lessons from his own father.
There is tension aplenty, drama that broils in the sun of an arid agricultural summer, and familial intrigue that simmers below the surface of words spoken low in the evening cool. The Deep South never seemed so fascinating.
- lmackin@irishtimes.com