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The missing
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2009
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Chapter One Sam Simoneaux leaned against the ship's rail, holding on in the snarling wind as his lieutenant struggled toward him through the spray, grabbing latches, guy wires, valve handles. "Pretty bad belowdecks," the lieutenant cried out against the blow. "That's a fact. Stinks too bad to eat." "I noticed you have a bit of an accent. Where are you from?" Sam felt sorry for him. The lieutenant was trying to be popular with his men, but none of them could imagine such a white- blond beanpole from a farm in Indiana leading anyone into battle. "I don't think I have an accent. But you do." The lieutenant gave him a startled look. "Me?" "Yeah. Where I was raised in south Louisiana, nobody talks like you." The lieutenant smiled. "Everybody's got an accent, then." Sam looked at the spray running over the man's pale freckles, thinking that in a heavy frost he'd be nearly invisible. "You come up on a farm?" "Yeah, sure. My family moved down from Canada about twenty years ago." "I was raised on a farm but figured I could do better," Sam yelled. "The lady down the road from us had a piano and she taught it to me. Moved to New Orleans when I was sixteen to be close to the music." The lieutenant bent into the next blast of wind. "I'm with you there. I can't throw bales far enough to farm." "How many days till we get to France?" "The colonel says three more, the captain, two, the pilot, four." Sam nodded. "Nobody knows what's goin' on, like usual." "Well, it's a big war," the lieutenant said. They watched a huge swell climb the side of the rusty ship and engulf a machine- gun crew hunkered down below them in a makeshift nest of sandbags, the deluge flushing men out on deck, where they slid on their bellies in the foam. The next few days were a lurching penance of bad ocean, flinttopped rollers breaking against the bows and spray blowing by the portholes like broken glass. Inside the ship, Sam slept among the thousands of complaining, groaning, and heaving men, but spent his waking hours at the rails, sometimes with his friend Melvin Robicheaux, a tough little fellow from outside of Baton Rouge. On November 11, 1918, their steamer escaped the mountainous Atlantic and landed at Saint-Nazaire, where the wharves were jammed with people cheering, some dancing together, others running in wild rings. Robicheaux pointed down over the rusty side of the ship. "How come everybody's dancin'? They all got a bottle of wine. You think they glad to see us?" Tugboats and dock locomotives were blowing their whistles through a hanging gauze of coal smoke. As he watched the celebration, Sam felt happy that he'd shown up with his rifle. The French looked like desperate people ecstatic about an approaching rescue. However, as the tugboats whistled and pushed the ship against the dock, he sensed the festival wasn't for this boatload of soldiers but for some more important event. Hardly anybody was waving at the ship. Four thousand troops unloaded onto the dock, and when all the men were lined up under the freight sheds and out of the wind, a colonel climbed onto a pile of ammunition crates and announced through a megaphone that an armistice had just been signed and the war was over. Many cheered, but a portion of the young recruits seemed disappointed that they wouldn't get to shoot at anybody. The weapons hanging on them, the ammunition stacked around in wooden crates, the cannons still being unloaded by the puffing dock cranes were suddenly redundant. Sam wondered what he would tell his friends back home of his war exper Excerpted from The Missing by Tim Gautreaux All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
Fiction/Biography Profile
Characters
Sam Simoneaux (Male), Bouncer, Cajun, Married, Family was massacred by a clan of outlaws; raised by his uncle; son died young from an illness; returned home after serving in World War I where he accidentally wounded a girl; worked at a department store until a girl was kidnapped during his shift; gets a job on a steamboat; searching for the truth behind the kidnapping and his familys' death
Genre
Fiction
Southern fiction
Mystery
Suspense
Topics
Southern life
Department stores
Missing children
Kidnapping
Musicians
Steamboats
Search for truth
Redemption
Loss
Setting
New Orleans, Louisiana - South (U.S.)
Louisiana - South (U.S.)
Time Period
1921 -- 20th century
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Trade Reviews
New York Times Review
WHILE violence never fails to provoke and disturb, it's the absence in its wake that continues to affect us. In his latest novel, "The Missing," the Louisiana author Tim Gautreaux focuses on the pointlessness of vengeance, showing that an eye for an eye not only blinds the world, it also makes a bloody mess, leaving holes in the dead and the living. Bullets have always grazed past Sam Simoneaux. When he was 6 months old, his family were shot in their home by bayou ruffians avenging an accidental death. The next day, the boy's uncle found the family cold and only the baby alive, thrust inside the stove by its father, "furry with ash, its face black but for the lightning strikes of its tears." This image - grief as negative space - perfectly captures Sam's character and the book's concerns. For Sam, having lost his family before forming any memories, "there were people missing in his life like big holes cut out of the night sky." Sam narrowly avoids the carnage of World War I. Reaching France after the armistice, his unit is assigned to defuse artillery shells. Gautreaux describes the aftermath of war in startling and poetic language. One day, roaming the battle-scarred fields, the soldiers find "a thigh-bone protruding from the earth" and five German helmets "as inert as dead turtles." These objects speak to the strange but palpable absence that follows violence and that has haunted Sam his whole life. When asked by a fellow soldier how he earned the nickname Lucky, Sam says, "For missing everything." Upon returning to New Orleans, he works as a "floorwalker" (an unarmed security guard) at a department store, but his quiet life is shattered when he fails to stop two thugs from kidnapping a little girl. Gautreaux has a mythic sense of plot, a keen ear for dialect and vivid powers of description, but subtle he ain't. Sam analyzes his drive to recover the missing child with an ease that suggests years in therapy: "What propelled him, he wanted to believe, was the awful diminished feeling he suffered whenever he thought of his dead child or of his taken family. If he could make another family whole, maybe that would help." The novel opens less with a bang than with a series of blasts: war, massacre, kidnapping, connected only through their hapless witness. After that explosive beginning, the book's middle section meanders as Sam pursues the kidnappers. His search leads him to a job on a riverboat - really a floating saloon, drifting through a part of the country where everyone seems to be related and armed, and where most nights end with a deadly brawl. In a novel overflowing with plot, not only does Sam find out fairly quickly who took the child (although he repeatedly botches her rescue), but he also learns the whereabouts of the men who killed his family and has to decide whether to avenge them. Gautreaux is an old-fashioned storyteller, a spinner of yarns with a moral. Make no mistake, vengeance begets vengeance. But love is an equally powerful force in this novel, which comes to a moving and resonant conclusion as Sam's life and the missing girl's converge in an unexpected way. When he finally returns to his childhood home, he's persuaded to take his mother's old washboard as a souvenir. "It's to imagine what happened before those," one character says, pointing to the bullet holes in the wall. The scars are still there, but so are the people who survived them. They can bear witness to the violence even as they put an end to the cycle, carried forward by love. This novel opens not with a bang but with a series of blasts: war, massacre, kidnapping. Malena Watrous's novel, "If You Follow Me," will be published next winter.
Publishers Weekly Review
Bayou shepherd of half-sunk souls, Gautreaux returns to the land of the lost and the lonely in his haunting and transient third book (after The Clearing). Post-WWI Louisiana is a "root-buckled" and "magnolia-haunted" underworld for seedy, drunken mobs and twisted backwoods families. Floating through the chaos is Sam Simoneaux, who, "half dead" after the slaughter of his parents and the later loss of his two-year-old son to fever, undertakes a quest to find a missing girl. Encountering embittered thieves, forlorn vaudevillians and icy bourgeoisie, Simoneaux is a keen observer who can find the one good stitch of humanity in an otherwise sordid tableau, even as his investigation begins to connect back to his family's murders. He is also a refreshingly candid voice, brimming with a lyrical intensity that graces some of the best Southern literature. Though the hasty, romantic wrapup to Sam's investigation and his refusal to exact revenge on his family's murderers-emotionally tepid even through the novel's decisive climax-obscure Gautreaux's finer redemptive tones, Sam's struggle to redeem the memories of his son and parents sustains the book's raw beauty. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
A mistake that changes the course of a life is not an unusual literary topic, but seldom is such a level of responsibility taken and restitution made as in Gautreaux's compelling third novel. As the floorwalker in New Orleans' best department store in 1921, Sam Simoneaux knows the policy is to lock the store doors when a lost child is not found in 15 minutes. When he fails to implement that policy, kidnappers make off with three-year-old Lily, the pretty and talented daughter of riverboat performers Elsie and Ted Weller. Fired from his job, Sam who understands the Wellers' grief, having lost a young son to illness hires on at the riverboat and taps railroad stationmasters for information to find the kidnappers. His initial error is compounded when he finds Lily and makes a moral judgment he has no right to make. But Sam, the victim of a horrendous crime as an infant, goes to great lengths to right his own wrongs without seeking vengeance for wrongs against himself, even in the face of pure evil. Gautreaux (The Clearing, 2003) again displays fluent prose, accomplished storytelling, and strong characterizations in this paean to the indefatigability of the human spirit. An exceptional novel.--Leber, Michele Copyright 2009 Booklist
Kirkus Review
Swampy hideaways and a Mississippi paddlewheel steamer factor in this story of a 1921 child kidnapping, from Louisiana author Gautreaux (The Clearing, 2003, etc.). Sam Simoneaux was a baby when his Cajun farming family in Louisiana was massacred by a clan of Arkansas outlaws, the Cloats. The sole survivor, Sam was raised lovingly by his Uncle Claude's family, yet still felt incompletea key concept here. In New Orleans, he would marry and have a son, who died young. In France, arriving after the Armistice, he accidentally wounds a French girl during a cleanup operation. Back in New Orleans, on his watch as a floorwalker in a department store, a small girl is kidnapped and Sam is fired. The missing Lily forms part of a melancholy triptych for Sam, along with his dead son and the French girl. Lily's parents, the Wellers, are musicians on an excursion boat plying the big river. Sam signs on as a bouncer, motivated by the desire to make another family whole again. A hot lead brings him to the Skadlocks, knavish rednecks living deep in the woods. They did the dirty work for the Whites, a rich, childless Kentucky couple. By revealing their identity upfront, Gautreaux robs his story of some suspense; it doesn't help that the Whites are bloodless, one-dimensional creations. There will be several treks through the woods as Ted Weller and his teenage son get involved, and an unconvincing climax at a tiny railroad station. Sam is an appealing protagonist, goodhearted to a fault, though his late decision to confront the Arkansas Cloats (beside whom the Skadlocks are sweethearts) is wholly out of character. Where Gautreaux does score is in his depiction of life onboard, the hard grind of breaking up hillbilly fights while the band plays on. The powerful period detail compensates for the rocky marriage between haunting theme and creaky plot. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Summary
The author of The Clearing ("the finest American novel in a long, long time"--Annie Proulx) now surpasses himself with a story whose range and cast of characters is even broader, with the fate of a stolen child looming throughout.

Sam Simoneaux's troopship docked in France just as World War I came to an end. Still, what he saw of the devastation there sent him back to New Orleans eager for a normal life and a job as a floorwalker in the city's biggest department store, and to start anew with his wife years after losing a son to illness. But when a little girl disappears from the store on his shift, he loses his job and soon joins her parents working on a steamboat plying the Mississippi and providing musical entertainment en route. Sam comes to suspect that on the downriver journey someone had seen this magical child and arranged to steal her away, and this quest leads him not only into this raucous new life on the river and in the towns along its banks but also on a journey deep into the Arkansas wilderness. Here he begins to piece together what had happened to the girl--a discovery that endangers everyone involved and sheds new light on the massacre of his own family decades before.

Tim Gautreaux brings to vivid life the exotic world of steamboats and shifting currents and rough crowds, of the music of the twenties, of a nation lurching away from war into an uneasy peace at a time when civilization was only beginning to penetrate a hinterlands in which law was often an unknown force. The Missing is the story of a man fighting to redeem himself, of parents coping with horrific loss with only a whisper of hope to sustain them, of others for whom kidnapping is either only a job or a dream come true. The suspense--and the complicated web of violence that eventually links Sam to complete strangers--is relentless, urgently engaging and, ultimately, profoundly moving, the finest demonstration yet of Gautreaux's understanding of landscape, history, human travail, and hope.
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