Natural wonders Tim Gautreaux’s deep South BY JULIA HANNA

Louisiana native Tim Gautreaux writes what he knows: a South so deep and dark that the people and places of his frequently anthologized short stories take on an exotic sheen, a sleight of hand he manages whether the time is marked by Wal-Marts and casinos ( " Welding with Children " ) or dusty, Depression-era desperation ( " Same Place, Same Things " ). In his new novel, The Clearing, Gautreaux plunges us into the operational details of a 1920s sawmill in the heart of a Louisiana cypress swamp while devoting equal attention to the spiritual mechanics of the men and women who live and work there.

Randolph Aldridge is the scion of a wealthy Pennsylvania lumber family. A trustworthy, practical sort, he’s been sent to Cajun country to turn around a mismanaged mill and keep tabs on his brother, Byron, a constable who maintains order with the aid of his pistol. A World War I veteran who has witnessed the slaughter of thousands, Byron also spends a great deal of time weeping and singing along to maudlin records played on a wind-up Victrola.

Shocked by his brother’s behavior and the mill’s violent culture, Randolph persuades Byron to downgrade his law-enforcement tool to a less deadly shovel. The brothers’ contrasting philosophies highlight one of the novel’s larger moral concerns: how to measure the weight of a human soul. When an escalating feud with the Sicilian mob that owns the camp’s saloon forces Randolph to kill a man himself, he begins to see his battle-scarred brother in a new light. " After dark, he thought too much and sometimes drank, and one quiet evening when he heard across the yard Byron wake howling out of another dreamed bloodletting, he saw that his one killing did not stack up against the ranks of German Kinder his brother had packed off to darkness. While this thought didn’t comfort him, it gave him perspective on the deep well of foreboding into which his brother sank each time he opened his eyes on a sunrise. "

The density and heft of such sentences give The Clearing an almost Biblical scale, an effect intensified by some of the symbols populating its pages: a blind horse that knows its way around the camp better than Randolph; a one-eyed devil named Crouch; a poisonous snake; and a baby boy (a bastard, no less) with amazing powers of redemption. There’s also a grand sort of distance in the way Gautreaux shapes the thoughts of his characters to fit his point: " Randolph hung out of the gangway remembering the invisible landscape, the moss-haunted trunks rising from a floating carpet of duckweed, the reptile-laced bog that still raised the hair on his neck if he thought about it too much. He wondered if the many-fanged geography rubbed off on people, made them primal, predatory. Had it changed him? Why else would he be out on this errand, risking gunfire? What had affected him if not the land itself that sickened and drowned his workers, land that would eat him alive, too, if given half a chance? "

Sometimes this approach comes off as forced and over-managed, and Gautreaux’s image-laden writing can distract you from what he’s describing. A railroad car is " a wooden cloud making its own sleepy thunder " ; men fight with straight razors that " dipped and flashed like bats flying under lightning. " And the plot takes some gratuitous swerves near the end. Even so, The Clearing offers a fascinating window into a particular place and time. The cypress swamp that succumbs to the Aldridge brothers’ mill is one of many to disappear, its wild strangeness eaten up in the march of progress: more railroad ties, more construction, more money. The swamp’s last tree is felled in a pallid ceremony that makes its loss tangible. It was " a beautiful tree with the red blush showing under the splintery bark and a pool of apple-green foliage at the crown, which was so high up that the egret perched in the topmost branches looked no bigger than a jaybird. " Like so many others, it’s destined for " churches and whorehouses, hospitals and jails, " but when the Aldridge brothers roll out of the wasteland they’ve created, it’s clear that all of man’s busy-making pales in comparison with the beauty, power, and menace of the natural world. It’s only fitting that the blind horse should see them off, " deceived and abandoned, but with a bright sun gleaming in its coat and a reedy grass springing up around its legs out of the demolished world. "