FICTION
Tim Gautreaux's third novel, "The Missing," opens with its protagonist, Sam Simoneaux, crossing the Atlantic Ocean with a shipload of American soldiers ready for a fight in World War I. Before they've left the French dock, though, a colonel climbs onto a pile of ammunition crates and announces "through a megaphone that an armistice had just been signed and the war was over," Gautreaux writes.
The narrow escape earns Simoneaux a nickname: Lucky.
The nickname may have been premature, though. Instead of combat, Simoneaux is ordered to help clear "the most dangerous ordnance" from a pockmarked battlefield.
It's a hopeless, Herculean task that turns tragic when the men decide to detonate an enormous pile of German artillery shells by shooting it with an abandoned cannon. The shot goes amiss and destroys an orphan's house miles away.
Simoneaux finds the girl, but a British captain listens coldly to his explanation and rejects his plea for help.
"The captain studied him for a long time, as if trying to gauge the workings of a mind accustomed to vast, empty American spaces where one could fire a howitzer all day long and hit nothing of consequence," Gautreaux writes.
"The Missing" is a novel about consequences, unintended or otherwise. And Gautreaux suggests that the British captain is wrong: Not even the United States is large enough to allow for actions without consequences.
Back in his native Louisiana, Simoneaux struggles to tamp down the memories of the horrors he saw in France. He finds work in a department store as a storewalker, looking out for shoplifters and bad bulbs in the store's gaudy chandeliers.
"If Mr. Krine spotted a dead bulb before Sam did, his pay would be docked a nickel," Gautreaux writes.
Life isn't great for Simoneaux, but it's better than exploding leftover artillery shells.
Then a 3-year-old girl disappears from the store, the victim of kidnappers, and Simoneaux loses his job for failing to foil the crime.
Driven ostensibly by the need to earn his job back, Simoneaux sets out to find the girl, but his motivations are more complicated than mere self-interest might suggest.
"He was the type of man who didn't want the bad things that happened to him to happen to anyone else; maybe somebody told him things when he was three or four years old that landed like seeds in the furrows of his character," Gautreaux writes. "However he was formed, his tendencies were costly ones."
The missing girl's parents are musicians performing on an excursion boat, and Simoneaux soon joins them on a trip up the Mississippi River.
The river trip is a cunning device for a traveling show of beautifully detailed environments and seemingly unconnected but dramatic events, but Gautreaux is such a mesmerizing writer that nothing he does seems easy or mechanical. Sentence by sentence, his prose is as accomplished as anything I've read in the past couple of years.
It's not merely the aesthetic accomplishments that recommend "The Missing." Gautreaux has grand thematic ambitions as well. The novel's anti-war sentiments and arguments for forgiveness over revenge will resonate for many contemporary readers.
And the novel's exploration of suffering and loss has a universal scope. They're a part of the human condition, Gautreaux suggests. If you haven't encountered them yet, you will.
As a clerk in a train station tells Simoneaux, "Everybody's got some big tragedy to deal with sooner or later."
It's how you deal with that tragedy that distinguishes you from others, Simoneaux learns. "The Missing" has its grim moments, but the suggestions of hope that Gautreaux offers shine brighter because of them.
Doug Childers is a Richmond writer and edits WAG, a literary Web site at www.thewag.net.
Email
Facebook
Google
Twitter
Favorites
More
Advertisement