Same Places, Same Things.

To judge by Tim Gautreaux's fiction, Thoreau's famous dictum had it half wrong: true, the mass of men do lead lives of desperation; but they are hardly quiet about it. Consider this from "License to Steal," in which an unemployed, hard-drinking workingman wakes one morning to discover that his wife has gone, taking the car - and her paycheck - with her:

Curtis put on his brown vinyl bedroom slippers and walked down to the corner to use the pay phone outside the Mudbug Cafe to call his son, Nookey, who worked at a sausage plant in Pochatoula.

"What do you want?" Nookey yelled over the whir of a dozen grinders. "I got a pig to do here about the size of a Oldsmobile."

There's nothing hidden about the miseries on display in Same Places, Same Things, a collection of stories set in the rural South. A locomotive engineer named Jesse guzzles a half pint of whisky, then drives a hundred cars of propane and vinyl chloride through the Louisiana night. A stoical well-pump repairman discovers a farmer dead by a freak accident and a bored and flirtatious wife who ominously doesn't much seem to care. A widowed strawberry farmer left to raise his infant granddaughter when the girl's mother dies in a plane crash gives her shotgun shells to play with as toys.

It's hard to know whether to find such doubtful men and dire predicaments funny, scary, or pathetic. These are lives harshly circumscribed by poverty, under-education, and alcohol, and Gautreaux inspects them sympathetically, but with a rueful, hardscrabble humor. When Leblanc, the strawberry farmer, needing help with the baby, undertakes to head out to a bar woman-hunting, he showers, shaves, and reaches for a green bottle on the bathroom shell only to slap his face with foot liniment his late wife bought years before. Gautreaux's antiheroes prove magnificently adept at failure.

Theirs is a world in which work - when it can be found - alternates petty humiliations with spectacular mishaps. Same Places, Same Things contains the most detailed writing about workplace accidents ever found outside of an OSHA report; it's a chilling study of how vehicles and heavy machinery get converted into lethal weapons. Tugboats sink; gravel trucks race downhill toward stopped schoolbuses; the train carrying deadly chemicals leaps off the track, igniting a whole town.

Carelessness and hard drinking feature prominently in these wrecks, along with a paradoxical sense of invulnerability. Habituated to irrelevance, unable to imagine being able to make a dent in the world, Gautreaux's protagonists have been made dangerous by their own deep impotence. "The sense of being invisible made Jesse think he could not be taken seriously, which was why he never voted, hardly ever renewed his driver's license, and paid attention in church only once a year at revival time." These stories shrewdly trace the roots of irresponsibility, not to a heedless assertion of self, but rather its opposite, a literal lack of self-image. With special acuteness Gautreaux captures the stunned disbelief of little men as they are precipitated, horribly and against their own wishes, into mattering.

Tim Gautreaux's prose strikes few notes, but strikes them true and clear. There's the terse descriptive vigor of "Died and Gone to Vegas," a Stephen Crane-like fable of liars' poker on a dredging ship anchored in the Mississippi:

The steel door next to the starboard triple-expansion engine opened, letting in a wash of frigid air around the day-fireman, pilot, deckhand, and welder who came into the big room cursing and clapping the cold out of their clothes. Through the door the angry whitecaps of Southwest Pass raced down the Mississippi, bucking into the tarnished Gulf sky.

More often, the order of the day is rueful humor. Boisterous farm idioms serve his characters' steady habit of lamentation ("We didn't know no more about raising children than a goat knows about flying"). One hears tones of Flannery O'Connor; but Gautreaux is a little less mordant, his humor more doleful than baleful.

...His grandson was living with him again, complaining of the evils of capitalism, eating his food, using all the hot water in the mornings....Lenny would never hold a job because he suffered from inborn disrespect for anybody engaged in business. Everybody was stupid. All businessmen were crooks. At twenty-five his grandson had the economic sense of a sixty-year-old Russian peasant.

Unlike O'Connor, Gautreaux doesn't make you feel his characters necessarily deserve their lot in life; it's enough that they're stuck with it.

These hefty portions of rural working-class life are served up with a distinct Cajun spice. The men in Same Places, Same Things have names like Robichaux and Lejeune; they sit around all night playing bourre, then wake in the morning for two links of boudin and a pot of grits; when something is creepy they get les frissons. In bars on their way to the plant to look for work they stop to snack on pickled eggs and pigs lips. Living hell is getting the car radio stuck on a public radio station, where the soprano, one remarks, "sounds like a tomcat hung up in a fan belt." Armadillos forage in the kitchen. It feels like a foreign country - one steeped in haplessness, where even the towns, places like Gumwood and Grand Crapaud, sound like insults - and the inhabitants know it. Curtis's son Nookey explains why his mother left: "Said she was tired of living in Louisiana with somebody didn't bring home no money. Said she wanted to move to the United States."

Once upon a time, regionalism wasn't merely an aspect of American culture; it was our culture. It is now beating a rapid retreat, driven relentlessly by Walmart, video megachains, the OJ trial, and a host of other forces which exert a profoundly homogenizing influence on our literal and imaginative landscapes, and on our language, too. "I ain't heard nobody around here talk like you in a while," says a woman in one of Gautreaux's stories, to a man all the way from distant Missouri. Robustly local in its settings, speech, and folkways, Same Places, Same Things creates a vividly realized milieu. To the characters busy making a mess of their lives there, Tim Gautreaux offers neither transcendence nor escape, merely the comforts of home - sloppy sinners, yes, but sinners in their own world. For the rest of us, these stories make for welcome relief from the blandness of McWorld; they bring reassuring evidence of the continuing existence of places away from the big place where, increasingly, we all live.

Rand Richards Cooper is the author of two books of stories, The Last to Go (Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich) and Big As Life (The Dial Press). He lives in Hartford, Connecticut.