ALL SAINTS’ DAY

A sharp, poignant debut that surveys several decades in the history of a haunted Louisiana family.

Maringouin, Louisiana, is one of those strange little bayou towns that gets into your blood and stays there: “ . . . only those who turned millionaire or queer left Maringouin for good.” The Bueche family has lived there since God knows when, and although they’ve all tried to get away at one time or another, they keep coming back. Ulysse Bueche, better known as Russell, went to New Orleans and took a job right after he finished high school, but as soon as he’d saved up enough money for a car he came back to Maringouin and started working for Texaco (like almost everyone else). Russell and his wife Doreen had three children, all boys: Whitaker (the eldest) and the twins Clayton and Ferdinand. The twins were a study in contrasts, Ferdinand walking and talking before he was one, while the slow-witted Clayton still crawled and babbled nearly a year later. Unfortunately, the two-year-old Clayton did manage to knock his twin brother down one day, and Ferdinand struck his head on the pavement and died. The accident casts a long shadow of unhappiness across an already gloomy family and intensifies the pain of Doreen’s long battle with cancer, which first costs her both breasts, then years later shows up in her lymph nodes. Russell seems unable to manage with family life after the accident, and he takes an assignment with Texaco that sends him across the world on oil tankers for many months each year. The author tells his tale in a jagged narrative that weaves back and forth in time, slowly shading in the relations between present and past and pinpointing the distant origins of longstanding family griefs.

Moving and fine, despite an unnecessarily complex narrative and the occasional patch of purple prose.