Tim Gautreaux' novel The Clearing is the kind of book that's every reviewer's (and reader's) agony and ecstasy. It is so finely constructed—precise as the miniature gearworks of a pocket watch, multi-layered as a Beethoven symphony—that I risk credibility by overpraising its virtues. After all, who's gonna believe someone who says their reading experience went something like this: quickness of breath, eyes rolling back in head, lashes fluttering erratically, soft moans escaping from lips. You'd think I was eating chocolate or having sex…or both. And so I agonize over my ecstasy when sitting down to write this review.

But you should heed my soft moans of pleasure, dear review-reader, for The Clearing is that rare thing among books: a reading experience that's not only better than chocolate-covered sex, it's superior to most (if not all) of the pleasures offered by its contemporary neighbors on the bookstore's new release table. It is the kind of novel that so completely transports us to another time, another place—the cypress forests of Louisiana in the 1920s—that we emerge on the other side of the story blinking and not quite sure of our surroundings. In short, Gautreaux (Same Place, Same Things) achieves what John Gardner called "the vivid and continuous dream" of fiction.

As I try to make my way down from the stratosphere (bibliosphere?) of ecstasy, I should point out that the brilliance of The Clearing lies mainly in its telling. The story and characters—a man tries to redeem his brother from a swamp of corruption and finds himself getting pulled into the mire as well—will be familiar to readers of Dostoevsky, Steinbeck and Faulkner and countless others who've brought us tales of sibling salvation. In Gautreaux' hands, however, the plot transforms into a lyric, epic experience and we feel as if we're hearing it for the first time.

Randolph Aldridge, the son of a Pittsburgh timber baron, is sent to a remote Louisiana mill town to convince his long-lost older brother Byron, the town's constable, to return to the family up north. Byron, psychologically damaged by World War I, disappeared from view for five years until the family received a telegram from him in Nimbus, Louisiana. Randolph has always idolized the brother who once could do everything well; now, it seems the shattered Byron is just trying to hold himself together for the sake of those around him.

His older brother was well educated, big, and handsome, and in spite of a disposition oscillating between manic elation and mannequin somberness, he'd been destined to take over management of the family's mills and timber. Then he'd gone off to the war, coming back neither elated nor somber but with the haunted expression of a poisoned dog, unable to touch anyone or speak for more than a few seconds without turning slowly to look over his shoulder. Randolph saw on the mantel the sepia photograph of a young man with dark hair laid over to the side, a sharp-eyed fellow who looked as though he had a politician's gift for talking to strangers and putting them at ease. After France, Byron spoke to people with his eyes wide, sometimes vibrating with panic, as if he expected them suddenly to burst into flames.

As Randolph sets off in search of Byron, Gautreaux devotes a lot of pages to describing the journey—by train and steam-powered paddleboat—as if it was one into the heart of darkness. Byron is no Conradian Kurtz—his roughshod violence does less to quell the saloon fights than it does to keep the coffin-maker in business.

When Randolph arrives, he finds his brother is nearly powerless in Nimbus; the mill hands living in "a clearing of a hundred stumpy acres" are controlled by the saloon owners, a family of Sicilians who cruelly extort the workers' wages in gambling and booze. Byron laments, "I thought I was through with the war, but this whole damned world's turned into one."

Randolph plans to remain at the clearing only until the timber is "cut out" of the surrounding forest and he can somehow convince his brother to return to Pittsburgh, but he's soon caught in the bog of violence as well. "Who knows how much trouble this will cause?" one mill worker says after a particularly bloody shootout with the Sicilians. Byron shakes his head and says, "What starts small gets bigger."

The Clearing does indeed get bigger as it goes along, the prose—dense as anything Faulkner ever wrote—swelling and overflowing the page. Gautreaux has given us a reading-by-immersion experience in these pages. In the time it takes to read this novel, and perhaps for many days after, we are fully convinced we're surrounded by humid cypress forests where violence lurks like patient alligators at every step.

Gautreaux uses figurative language to evoke a precise sense of time and place. So, on the first page, we get a sentence like this describing a train engineer: The man looked as though all unnecessary meat had been cooked off of him by the heat of his engine. Gautreaux composes the kind of sentences which roll around on the tongue like all-day jawbreakers. The beauty of his words catches us up short at least once every dozen pages and causes us to slow down, savoring The Clearing bit by bit, phrase by phrase. Later, we come across another description of an aged lawman: The man's face was soft, his features rounded like those of a statue left for centuries out in the rain. Or, this, Randolph's first sight of Nimbus: "The settlement lay before him like an unpainted model of a town made by a boy with a dull pocketknife."

The novel comes to a crescendo with a final chapter that, even during a rereading, has such linguistic and thematic beauty that it brought tears to my eyes in a way I thought only the final notes of "Ode to Joy" ever could. As in the rest of the novel, this elegiac conclusion proves Gautreaux composes words like Beethoven composed notes.


Recommended: Yes