Reading the South

The Missing.
By Tim Gautreaux.

New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009. 378 pages. $24.95 cloth.

In The Missing, author Tim Gautreaux returns to the fictional landscape of early 20th-century Louisiana that he so successfully portrayed in his critically acclaimed 2003 novel, The Clearing. As he did in that earlier work, Gautreaux delivers a compelling piece of literature dealing with people struggling against the land, each other, and the irreversible advance of time.

The Missing’s jacket blurb suggests that the book is a kind of detective story set aboard a Mississippi riverboat. To a superficial degree, this promotional copy is true. The plot begins unfolding when a band of rustic malcontents abduct the precocious daughter of two excursion boat musicians in a New Orleans department store. Because the child has been lost under his watch, its central character, World War I veteran and store floorwalker Sam Simoneaux, makes it his personal quest to recover the little girl. He takes a job aboard the Ambassador, the aging showboat aboard which the missing child’s parents perform, and it is here where much of the novel’s storyline unfolds. As the vessel plies the water between New Orleans and Cairo, Simoneaux not only pieces together clues that lead him to the missing girl, but also to the men responsible for the wholesale murder that had left him orphaned as an infant.

It does not take long to discover, however, that the girl’s disappearance and the Simoneaux family killings are primarily a vehicle for discovering what is “missing” in the lives of the novel’s central characters. Underneath its suspenseful narrative, The Missing probes the moral and philosophical underpinnings of human loss, mutability, and emotional separation. Questions of the unknown and unknowable permeate the novel’s smallest details. The author’s description of Simoneaux’s thoughts on a daytime cruise full of Confederate veterans offers a sense of this aesthetic: “Most of the men were animated, wore their old uniforms or some version of those gray markings, but he wondered about the ones who’d stayed at home, who wanted nothing of the remembering, who’d gotten in the mail a two-cent postcard announcing the veterans’ excursion and thrown it in the stove and then maybe looked out the window, gladdened by the fact that people weren’t shooting each other down in the street.” Gautreaux frequently proves himself a master of what historians call “interpreting silences.”

New Orleans and the jazz-infused Mississippi riverboat culture of the 1920s provide the backdrop for The Missing, and the deft touch with which Gautreaux renders his historical portrait reveals a world of steam locomotion, muddy river water, and passengers eager for a few hours’ escape on the dance floor. Yet the boat and its crew supply only half of the narrative’s tension. Every drop of the gangplank sets in motion a confrontation between the rustic and urbane, rich and poor, good and evil. Unlike the protagonist’s piano playing, Gautreaux’s prose never strikes a false note, carefully avoiding the clichéd references that readers of Louisiana and jazz culture must so often endure. To wit, his portrayal of the showboat era’s twilight is so convincing because he never oversells his enormous knowledge of the subject matter. Instead, Gautreaux seamlessly transports the reader into a different time, to a world with deadly disease epidemics, without air conditioning, and where simple folk collide with the inevitable advance of modernity.

Works that engage themes of familial duty and love, guilt, human frailty, cowardice, and vengeance are seldom as witty, literate, and, above all, entertaining as Gautreaux’s new novel. The Missing manages to ask vital questions of Southern culture, particularly with regard to class tension, but consistently does so in a way that neither patronizes nor panders. Perhaps, then, Gautreaux’s greatest triumph has been to deliver profound moral commentary without beating anyone over the head in the process. Readers will likely find themselves on the last page recalling the author’s imagery of a bygone era and culture and contemplating his novel’s deeper message.

Justin Nystrom