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

Jon McGregor

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 “Family agriculture seemed to be over,” the narrator notes, “and had not been replaced by any other compelling idea.”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.

There is no resorting to archetype, no easy use of shorthand; Drury's characters are, in particular ways, downright odd

And it’s those sideways jolts – a retiree who takes LSD to ease his aching neck, a man who dies in his attic “surrounded by the jars of his jar collection”, the time Dave Green flew to Hawaii by accident – that give The End of Vandalism the vivid come-aliveness that distinguishes it from the other quietly spoken realist rural novels for which it could easily be mistaken. There is a steady accumulation of unexpected detail, as, page by page, we meet new characters, and are given new information about them, and learn new and more complicated ways in which their lives intersect. There is no resorting to archetype, no easy use of shorthand; these people are, in very particular ways, downright odd. As all of us are. In the stories of our own lives things happen moment by moment, and we keep getting stranger, and this is the truth Drury is leading us to here.

The characters in this novel are in love with storytelling. They launch into wildly tangential stories with little prompting, usually knowing that they will be patiently heard or at the least not interrupted, and their tales have the air of being honed in the retelling. (As does Drury’s careful prose.) We learn, in passing, of Lester Ward, who ran the hatchery in Pinville and always wore a hat; we learn why the sheriff’s department has no more than a barbershop’s worth of space (it goes back to 1947, “when the sheriff was a popular fellow called Darwin Whaley”); we hear, very briefly, about the failed Mixer cult of Mixerton; and we are reminded of Helene Plum, who “reacted to almost any kind of stressful news by making casseroles, and had once, in Fairibault, Minnesota, attended the scene of a burned-out 18-wheeler with a pan of scalloped potatoes and ham”. (Notice the geographical detail there; an essential part of the story, to those hearing it told in Grouse County. Notice, too, the deliciously impeccable punctuation.)



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Scattered farmhouses in The End of Vandalism. Photograph: Ryan McGinnis/Alamy

These stories are the novel’s subject and its method. We move through the book, from scene to scene, character to character, location to location, by way of story: stories told, stories lived, stories hinted at. It’s been said, by people I wish could know better, that The End of Vandalism lacks a plot. And it’s true that, if you’re the kind of reader who can get to the end of a novel where 60 characters muddle their way through a great variety of incident and tangled interaction, and still complain that “there wasn’t much of a plot”, this may not be the book for you. But if you live in the real world, where life stalls and lurches forward with little real pattern and where the textures of our relationships accumulate moment by moment, then this is a novel you will recognise as being crammed with narrative. These are not just quirky rural anecdotes Drury is spinning out for us. These are intricate, interconnected stories of the big things that happen in people’s lives; the failures and successes of relationships, businesses and families, the making and thwarting of plans.

I don’t think it would be too much of a spoiler – this is a book about real life, after all – to say that while everyone talks about how outrageously, laugh-out-loud funny this book is, they sometimes forget to mention that there is a great sadness at its heart. When it comes, after much quiet detail and story and straight-faced laughter, it hits with the shock of a bird striking a window; a great blue heron, say, gliding into the picture window of a newly renovated frame house overlooking a peaceful and unruffled lake. There is tranquility, and gentle good humour, and then there is a crash and a bloody mess, and then there is tranquility again and things are changed. It’s a particular, lasting sadness, one from which there is no easy recovery or resolution; one which is in fact still vivid 17 years later, when we meet these same characters again in Drury’s fifth novel, Pacific. Forget all that stuff about the healing power of time, Drury tells us. Time won’t heal a thing. This book will hurt you, if you read it properly, and it will make you feel complicit, the way two happy homeowners feel complicit when they step outside to look at the still-warm body of a broken bird and think that if only the house hadn’t been built just there the bird would still be alive. (I’m wondering, here, if it’s any coincidence that the image I’ve chosen for a sudden shock is that of a bird striking a window, when just such an incident occurs in the book a few pages earlier. I suspect it’s a mark of Drury’s carefully worked sophistication that it is not.)

Complicit? Well, yes. If you read this book with something approaching the patience and empathy and open-heartedness that Drury has offered his characters, you will become invested in these lives. And this investment will be something you have created, as a reader, in collaboration with Drury. You will have given life to these people, only to let them experience pain. You will have allowed yourself to feel something like love for a group of complicated characters who do messy and regrettable and sometimes unlikable things. Charles “Tiny” Darling, to take one example, spends most of the book slouching towards trouble for what are often, in his telling, perfectly reasonable motives. And he does these things with such a good-natured acceptance of his own failures that we find ourselves rooting for his future well-being. “I don’t consider myself a loser,” he says, in what I take to be one of his and therefore the entire novel’s defining moments; “and yet, I have lost things.” How can you not love someone with such saint-like humility and self-knowledge?

This is the love that the best fiction teaches.

The best fiction teaches us to be better readers, and to be less tolerant of weaker or softer writing, and The End of Vandalism does that. But the best fictions also make us better readers of the world, and of the people around us: more attuned to the stories lying about the place, more aware of particularities, more likely to see the humour that insists on arising, and the sadness. The End of Vandalism does all of that as well. Brace yourself. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Tom Drury. Photograph: Baltel/Sipa/REX Shutterstock

Yiyun Li

Between the Russians and the Irish, you would think all the good hunting scenes in literature had been written, that the drama of the chase – Somerville and Ross’s horses, Tolstoy’s dogs, the handlers and the serfs and the rabbits and foxes – is a thing of the past. More pressing concerns occupy our lives: we hunt for jobs, for houses, for status on social media.

A little over halfway through Drury’s Hunts in Dreams (2000), a fox sneaks past two characters in conversation.

As he spoke, a fox slipped from the trees and stood for a moment with one paw raised before trotting away along the lane, nose down, tail high. There wasn’t much to it. The fox jumped on to a stone wall, walked on it for a short distance then dropped off into a field. Lost in his calculations, the hunter did not see the fox, and Lyris couldn’t say a word.

What kind of writer offers such an anticlimactic hunting scene? Or perhaps a more pertinent question would be: what kind of hunter hunts so obliviously? One who hunts in dreams, we could cheat and say, but then what kind of dream is that?

Recently, I participated in a discussion in which a writer termed a book “necessary” because it was about here and now. I was reminded of the minor society hostess in War and Peace who was fond of “mentioning our time as limited people generally like to do, supposing that they had discovered and appreciated the peculiarities of our time and that people’s qualities change with time”. In truth, all lives are indispensable lives. There are only well written and poorly written books. The obsession with the status of necessity – or worse, newsworthiness – seems the least democratic way of reading in a democratic country.

I wonder if this obsession explains why Drury is not yet a household name in US literature. His characters have little means to claim necessity, and seldom make the effort to become somebodies. The characters in Hunts in Dreams live in the American midwest around the turn of the 21st century: they are farmers and townsfolk, petty thieves and arsonists, orphans and widows, amateur hunters and actors, incompetent governors and half-hearted protesters. They are also people who christen their house after Thomas Hardy’s cottage, puzzle over Montaigne’s words past midnight, recite Tennyson after lovemaking, and rehearse a Chekhov play in an abandoned reform school. There wasn’t much to it. These words could be taken to apply not only to the fox and its casual escape, but to all existences in Drury’s fiction. Yet there is much to it, even too much, as Drury makes clear in this entrancing novel.

How does one write about a nobody, or a collective of nobodies? A character can be enlarged into something beyond lifesize – there are enough tragedies to make that transformation possible. Or else she or he can be diminished. And a small nobody rarely fails to provide laughter.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Vivid visions of the midwest … Kansas, Ellsworth County. Photograph: JC/John Coletti

To write any character life-sized is a challenge; Drury’s rare achievement is to populate a novel with a group of life-sized nobodies. How does he do this? By abandoning both tragedy and comedy, in the recognition that life’s damages are often done and felt in the least dramatic ways, and absurdity results from people’s efforts to be honest or serious.

When the seven-year-old Micah accidentally locks himself outside his grandmother’s house in the middle of the night (after she has fed him brandy with the hope of making him sleep), he thinks of calling out for her.

Instead, he spoke her name in a low and confident voice that she might not have heard if she were standing beside him. “Grandma,” he said calmly and generously, as if bringing to her attention in the kindest way some obvious flaw in her logic. “Grandmother.” And what difference did it make? The night he was afraid of was inside the house, not outside.

When Joan, an actor-turned-proselyte-turned-mother, abandons her family, those left behind – father and children and a visiting uncle – sit down at dinner.

No one talked about Joan. It seemed unfair to her that in her absence everything was so normal. Of course, things could still go very wrong; it was only seven o’clock.

There are loaded guns in Drury's Dreams, but it's left to a wooden cloth-hanger or a child-sized knife to cause injuries

There are loaded guns in the novel, but it is left to a wooden cloth-hanger or a child-sized knife to cause injuries. The drumming hoofs and braying hounds of the 19th century have given way to a group of baffled hunters, whose main feat is to catch a young man in a fox trap and stop him from burning down a house.

Drury is a strange writer. Not eccentric, because he neither indulges nor exploits the innocence of his characters (and it’s from their innocence that humour is born); not experimental, because he does not prize his own strangeness above that of his characters’.

It is difficult to introduce Drury’s work. Perhaps the best method is to push the novels into the hands of a friend or a student and insist that she or he read it, which is what I’ve done over the years. My hope is to find others who appreciate his writing, who share the belief that we are all necessary – and that this is what needs a closer look, in life and in literature.

• Tom Drury’s third Grouse County novel, Pacific, is out this month from Old Street (RRP £12). To order a copy for £9.60, go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of £1.99.