SAME PLACE, SAME THINGS

A terrific debut collection from a Louisiana writer whose stylish, sympathetic understanding of working-class sensibilities and Cajun culture gives his work a flavor and universality unique among contemporary writers. Gautreaux's 12 stories move to a musical beat, and they're filled with both verbal surprises and sudden narrative twists- -sometimes into unanticipated violence, sometimes, contrarily, toward revelations of more decency and strength in his characters than we had believed them capable of. His people include the itinerant pump repairman (in the title story) who gets unfortunately involved with a phlegmatic widow who'll do anything to escape her stifling life and environment; the middle-aged widower (of ``The Courtship of Merlin Le Blanc'') who finds he can't escape the constrictions—and satisfactions—of family; a well-meaning exterminator (``The Bug Man'') who becomes intimately, catastrophically involved in the lives of his clients; and, most memorably, the nursing-home employee (in the wonderful ``Deputy Sid's Gift'') whose confused responses to the ``black drunk truck thief'' who keeps invading his life eventually rescue him from his own meanness. Only one piece (the smug ``Navigators of Thought'') misfires, though the repetition of similar plot elements and the use in more than one story of the same names suggest that the book could have used more stringent editing. All of the tales are powered by a racy, vigorous prose that makes you want to keep on quoting (``He didn't know her from Adam's house cat''; ``You can't work too steady if you're a Louisiana man. You got to lay off and smell the roses a bit, drink a little beer and put some wear on your truck''). Moving and memorable portrayals of people who really are changed—and, often, in spite of themselves, uplifted—by the complexities of their experiences and their relationships. The gifted Gautreaux harkens back to the early work of Flannery O'Connor.