FictionPaul is good-looking, affable, obsessed with dancing, uncomplicated and content in his job repairing machines. His wife Colette is beautiful, pushy and unhappy with her lot. All he wants is an easy life. She seems to want a lot more and, because she is the prettiest girl in the small Louisiana town in which the couple have been born, raised and still live, Colette reckons she should have everything and more, and is losing patience.
This book should come complete with a large "proceed with care" warning affixed to its cover. There are a few problems. Firstly, anyone who has read Gautreaux's second novel, The Clearing (2003), will be expecting something (if only hints) of what was to come in The Clearing from this first book, which was published in the US in 1998. They will be disappointed. It is almost impossible to predict that Gautreaux would have managed successfully to shake off the silliness and obviousness of his début to achieve the tighter prose of The Clearing, a dramatic, profound story of events in a Louisiana logging camp in the 1920s.
That said, while it is common for many fine first novels to be followed by poor second books, it is almost perversely interesting to see a clichéd début dramatically bettered by the follow-up. So far, so confusing. Gautreaux, true to his Southern heritage, has an easy, fluid feel for language and is capable of writing in images that are often original and offbeat. And yet The Next Step in the Dance, for all its physicality and energy, is straitjacketed by the narrowness of its central plot.
That plot, such as it is, concerns the year-old marriage of Paul and Colette. On the surface, this is a match made in heaven between two good-looking people - and their relationship appears to have been largely motivated by the superficial reality of her beauty. But the relationship is now falling apart thanks to his lack of ambition. The biggest flaw in the narrative is Colette, "the only drop-dead beautiful woman in Tiger Island". A sharp-tongued shrew of monumental ego and little patience, she works as a bank clerk and has been sorely tested by Paul's slap-happy attitude to life.
When she finds Paul - who seems willing to dance (just dance) with any female who happens to be standing near him in a dancehall - attending a drive-in movie with a woman, Paul explains: "This is Lanelle. She said she couldn't find anyone to come watch this movie with her."
It seems minor, but for Colette it is the end. She throws Paul out of the house and he returns to Mom and Dad, who don't mind all that much because Paul can fix anything.
In an effort to meet her long-awaited true destiny, Colette heads for California. Paul follows her out and they begin the slow process of dating all over again. If this proves tedious for Paul, it is much more so for the reader. The dialogue between the pair consists of unfunny sexual banter, with Colette using her charms as some sort of prize. Meanwhile, of course, there are other men, such as her boss, eager to get their hands on her.
Living separate lives in California provides the estranged lovers with their first real experience of loneliness. Gautreaux also uses the interlude to consider the contrasting realities of life in California with the family-based intensity of a small southern town, in which the heavy French influence still undercuts everyday life. It is a hectic, busy narrative, full of shouting, some humour and a great deal of incident.
After a brief period of material success, Colette and Paul are both confronted by moral dilemmas. Colette's is predictable, while Paul's is more interesting - an ethical issue makes him choose honour over career, after an initial wrong turning. Back home in Tiger Island, family drama begins to surface and, in an effort to push the thin storyline along, Gautreaux introduces some hardship. This allows Colette a chance to prove she is as resourceful as she is sassy. Exactly how believable her adventures as a rat-catcher, fisherwoman and sharpshooter are depends largely on the tolerance of the individual reader.
Throughout all of this, Paul suffers various setbacks. The finale - a doomed fishing trip that presents Paul with certain death, or the fear of what Colette will say if he loses their boat - again tests the reader as much as it tests Gautreaux's ability to spin a yarn.
All in all, The Next Step in the Dance is very much a first novel, albeit one of gusto, energy and overblown writing. Populated by a cast of forgettable caricatures, spearheaded by Paul's unbelievable (if likeable) old grandpa, it is like reading an overlong James Wilcox novel marked by more talk, lengthier speeches and fewer jokes.
True, Colette would try the patience of anyone, and who cares about her marriage or the lessons she learns? The real significance of this folksy, not-as-funny-as-it-thinks-it-is saga, with its theatrical conversations - "Me, I'm 90 years old and you think I'm always look like this (sic). What you think I looked like at 50, when my husband was makin' good money and the boys was out of the house and I had a new car and wrinkles hadn't took over my face?" - is that Gautreaux turned to stories he had heard as a boy and from them shaped a far better book, his second novel.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
The Next Step in the Dance By Tim Gautreaux Sceptre, 340pp. £16.99
