Tom Cooper's The Marauders is a wild pirogue ride through the post-Katrina, post-oil spill bayous of Barataria, outside New Orleans. His characters are the soul of this first novel, a sometimes hilarious, sometimes heartbreaking "swamp noir" gumbo with echoes of John Kennedy Toole, Larry Brown and Daniel Woodrell.
The nets of small town Jeanette, La., shrimpers yield nothing but a meager stunted catch that restaurants don't want out of fear of toxic pollution. Cooper captures all the earthy smells and feral sub-strata of the bayou--the "quagmires of mud, impassable brambles, murky lagoons... the jungly bracken, the susurrus of swamp life... the alligators rumored to be a hundred years old and big as sedans." But as Cooper's colorful swamp dopers, shrimpers, drifters and scavengers chase their own treasures and quick scores, 18-year-old Wes Trench slowly moves toward reconciliation with his demanding father and a recognition of the small pleasures in a hardscrabble life. Accepting his legacy, he painstakingly builds his own steel and cypress shrimp boat.
Crazy as his neighbors might be, harsh as his father might seem, unforgiving as the bayous are, Wes finds that Barataria is the home where "he felt the tug of the future... the gravity of the past." When he finally launches the Cajun Gem, he thinks of his dead mother and hopes for her approval: "knowing himself and knowing his father... she probably would have considered it enough." Cooper's The Marauders is as grounded in the simple truth as it is awash in the outlandishly eccentric. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.