“‘I remember, because I thought, That’s odd.’”
What I truly treasure in books — what I tend to remember long after the grand stage sets and costumes have been packed away in some corner of my mind’s garage — are the odd bits of surplus life. I’m thinking of the moment when Ivan Ilych’s widow thinks to warn a visiting mourner that he shouldn’t sit on the chair with the broken spring, then decides that giving such a warning would be somehow not in keeping with her widowhood. Or how Roberta, arriving at her friend’s house at the beginning of Munro’s “Labor Day Dinner,” can only think of getting the raspberry dessert she’s brought into the freezer.
These moments would never make it into even the most conscientious of summaries — they barely even qualify as moments. They are gratuitous shows of authorial perceptiveness, stray hairs forming accidental whorls in the margins of a Xerox.
The richest source of these moments I know of is the work of Tom Drury. His novels — particularly his trilogy of novels set in Grouse County, Iowa — are corn silos spilling over with them. I pity the poor editorial interns tasked with writing the jacket copy for his books (A bunch of loosely related Midwestern people drift around living their lives?), but I read them in a state of hypnotized delight.
His best book — or anyway the one to start with — is The End of Vandalism. It follows a year or two in the lives of an almost un-manageably wide assemblage of rural Midwesterners. To the extent that it has a story, it concerns the love triangle between an upstanding sheriff named Dan, a chronic screwup named Tiny, and Tiny’s increasingly weary wife Louise. But the book’s true protagonist — the thing that you follow eagerly from chapter to chapter, rooting for, shaking your head in wonder at— is Drury’s sensibility.
He was a handsome man in a yellow shirt who sold billboard space and breath mints. He was popular in high school but felt somewhat victimized by everything that came after.
At one point Dan, the sheriff, goes up in a crop duster with a neighbor named Paul to look for missing farm equipment.
The county had its winter colors — gray and dark brown shot through with strips of pale white. After a while, Paul, like all small-plane pilots in Dan’s experience, wanted Dan to try the wheel.
This is the kind of writing — dry, observant, strenuously straight-faced — that makes me… not laugh out loud exactly, but huff through my nostrils loud enough to make my wife say What? The diction is plain; the discernment is superhuman. Drury is like Raymond Carver’s mischievous younger brother. He keeps trying to take solemn note of ordinary people going about their ordinary lives, but people keep turning out, when closely observed and scrupulously recorded, to be hilarious.
Midway through the novel Tiny, Louise’s criminally adrift husband, drives to Colorado in search of work. He ends up visiting Louise’s sister June and her husband Dave Green. One night the three of them — Dave and June are hoping to find a fortune in silver that’s rumored to be buried somewhere in the town — decide to have a seance.
The three Green children were at the movies, and June went around the house putting masking-tape crosses on the doors of their rooms… She explained how you could never expose children to the influence of the underworld and asked Tiny if he had any pictures of children or any children’s belongings.
Tiny explains that he does have a couple of crayon drawings by an ex-girlfriend’s nephew. June takes this in solemnly. “‘Drive by a church tonight before going home,’” she instructs him.
“I thought you had to go in the church,” said Dave.
“I heard driving by is sufficient,” said June. “I remember, because I thought, That’s odd.”
This last line of June’s is — though the competition is stiff — my favorite sentence in the book. I love the casual acuity of the dialogue within the dialogue (I thought, That’s odd.) I love the legalistic parsing of an absurd superstition.
But most of all I love that Drury has here captured a phenomenon so small that Jerry Seinfeld would consider it picayune. Everyone, I imagine, has at some point relied on a mnemonic of anti-intuitiveness: remembering that a certain light switch controls the living room because it’s the one you wouldn’t think. But this has never before, so far as I know, made it into literature. Drury is, in this scene and hundreds like it, performing a service like Alan Lomax holding out his microphone on some never-before-visited front porch. He is setting down for all time the clumsy and halting and accidentally beautiful sound of life itself.
I love Drury, and started with End of Vandalism as well. There's some Charles Portis in this work, don't you think? I love Portis too — I've shared his books as much as any author I know, and I've been thanked every single time. Have you done something on Portis?
Wonderful analysis! Love your comparison to Alan Lomax, 'holding out his microphone on some never-before-visited front porch.' Adding this Tom Drury novel to my reading list! Thanks 🙂