In praise of Tom Drury's small-town America

Drury’s early novels, The End of Vandalism and Hunts in Dreams, may seem similar to other quiet studies of the midwest, but don’t be fooled. Yiyun Li and Jon McGregor celebrate the off-kilter world of a modern master

First, a warning. If you read Tom Drury’s first novel The End of Vandalism (1994)you will become one of those people who try to foist it on others, your eyes shining with the unsettling delight of having lived through it. You will become one of those people who quote the best sentences, flicking through the pages to where you have them underlined. Listen to this description of the vet, you’ll say: “His face was narrow, his hair thick, his eyes widely spaced. He’d been working with horses a long time.” Or this account of someone working on a broken-down car: “She had got down on her hands and knees and looked, but this hadn’t fixed it.” Or the scene with Sheriff Dan Norman painting his own election signs late at night: “The signs were nothing fancy. They said things like DAN NORMAN IS ALL RIGHT.” I could go on. You probably will. But be careful. It’s not enough to tell people that this book is funny. There’s more to it than that.

Advocates of Drury’s work have a problem: his novels look very similar to many other quietly spoken realist novels of the rural American midwest, and there is no easy way of explaining why this one is so different. Grouse County, the setting for The End of Vandalism and the follow-up novels Hunts in Dreams and Pacific, is a fictional location, but one we think we recognise: a flat land, with gravel roads, scattered farmhouses, and the occasional lake. Water towers. Ditches. Barns. This is unremarkable territory, which has been well mapped in American fiction of the last 150 years. And yet. There is something a little off-kilter. Drury has talked of drawing on his childhood memories – he grew up in Iowa – while setting these stories in the present day. So there is a kind of dislocation; a 1950s or 60s sensibility dropped into a 90s social landscape. “Family agriculture seemed to be over,” the narrator notes, “and had not been replaced by any other compelling idea.” These people seem adrift, uncertain of their place in the world while at the same time all too certain of their own identity. This is realism, then, but a realism jolted a little bit sideways.

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