The Next Step in the Dance
by Tim Gautreaux
List Price: $13.00
Pages: 352
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 0312199368
Publisher: Picador USA
From the author of the acclaimed story collection Same Place, Same
Things comes a novel filled with a rare and affecting sense of tradition
and possibility. Paul Thibodeaux is a handsome young man married to Colette,
the most beautiful woman in the small Louisiana town where they grew up.
For Paul, life is complete: a wife he loves, machines to repair, and a
lively local dance hall. But Colette wants more, and when she sets off
for California in search of something better, Paul follows her there and
back, waiting to see if she’ll change her mind about him and their life
together.
How they come to realize the importance of home and marriage makes for a novel that is at once an adventure,
a love story, and a moving portrait of a place and a culture rarely explored
in contemporary fiction. Tim Gautreaux writes with wit, compassion, and
a sharp eye for the details that make us who we are, wherever we are.
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1. Does the intense use of regional details limit the universality of the novel?
2. For what reasons does Paul not give up on his wife when many other men would have walked away?
3. Does Colette dislike her husband as much as she thinks she does?
4. What is the thematic function of the Larousse twins?
5. What part does religion play in the action of this novel?
6. Which characters do you feel alien to in the beginning that you warm up to toward the end?
7. What does each main character give up by the end of the novel? What do they get in return?
8. Explain the metaphor of dancing as it relates to the novel as a whole.
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"This is a mighty first novel, told with cinematic grip. With it, Gautreaux himself takes the next step in the moody, sweet dance of Southern literature."—GQ
"What wins us over is Gautreaux’s powerful, often poetic mix of colorful detail and rapid-paced suspense, not to mention his keen ear for Cajun dialect."—The New York Times Book Review
"Gautreaux chronicles the Louisiana landscape with loving precision and insight. Every sound, every smell, is just right...This is both an elegy for a disappearing way of life and a celebration of enduring values."—Susan Larson, The New Orleans Times-Picayune
"A smartly turned-out first novel, about the push and pull between a young Louisiana couple, that holds you snug and won’t let go...[an] A."—Entertainment Weekly
