UC Riverside

Jules Plauche doesn't want to go home. It's late 1944 and the Army has patched him up after a car accident in Italy which killed his older brother. He joined up to escape the hidebound Catholic culture of Bienville, a tiny farm town in south Louisiana. Now, addicted to painkillers, traumatized by combat and struggling with so many injuries he's numbered them, Jules returns ready to re-fight old family battles. They don't want me, he thinks, they want my brother. But instead of rejection he gets a hero's welcome. Soon he's in the grip of powerful forces--personal, sexual, cultural--that have their own ideas about his future.

As the seasons roll inevitably from planting to harvest, Jules must make a momentous decision--seek the life he dreamed of outside Bienville, or hide in his addiction and the safety of the town's isolation. The ghost of his dead brother, a beautiful woman, a stroke and the intrusion of agribusiness make the choice even tougher.

Avoyelles is a novel about a man and a culture at a moment of dramatic upheaval. For five generations the Plauche family made their way as subsistence farmers in a place almost untouched by the outside world. Just as Jules is pulled in different directions, so is his family and their way of life. Full of the natural beauty, the rituals and the Cajun people south Louisiana is famous for, Avoyelles explores ideas of home and place--belonging, security, tradition and inevitable change.