NO PLACE, LOUSIANA

A plainspoken, defiantly uninflected first novel about two clueless Louisiana teenagers who get hitched in the mid-1960s and embark on a sadistic, acquisitive trek for the elusive American better life.

Nita Morrow's first impression of her taciturn, car-obsessed blind date Louis Toussaint is that he's mean-looking, and though “not one hour rolls by before Nita knows she hates Louis,” she still agrees to marry him in order to get out of her dumpy Louisiana hometown. Louis has a high-school diploma, a job in a neighboring rice mill, and his family is echt Catholic Cajun. By contrast, in Nita's broken, improvident home her stepdad excoriates her and constantly walks out on her abject mother. Nita craves a life like the kind she reads about in magazines, and over the grinding years of moving up with a husband infatuated by her beauty yet unable to express himself in more than grunts, she pushes Louis mercilessly to buy bigger houses and more things for their increasing family. The two children, Marc and Jo, come to embody their parents’ fatal disharmony: Nina dotes on Marc and bribes him with material blandishments to perform successfully, while persistently punishing Jo for failing to fit her store-bought sense of what is worthy. The result in the children's teenage years during the ’70s is bitterness and tragedy. Pousson (Assistant Director/Rutgers Writing Program) crafts relentless blocks of present-tense, declarative sentences that strangely suit the superficial gloss of his white-trash characters. The outcome has the grim rhythm of a family chronicle, but it often seems to be playing dumb.

Problematic, but it will be extremely interesting to see what this author does next.