Driftless

by David Rhodes

Overview

“A fast-moving story about small town life with characters that seem to have walked off the pages of Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology.”—The Wall Street Journal
 
The few hundred souls who inhabit Words, Wisconsin, are an extraordinary cast of characters. The middle-aged couple who zealously guards their farm from a scheming milk cooperative. The lifelong invalid, crippled by conflicting emotions about her sister. A cantankerous retiree, haunted by childhood memories after discovering a cougar in his haymow. The former drifter who forever alters the ties that bind a community. In his first novel in 30 years, David Rhodes offers a vivid and unforgettable look at life in small-town America.
 
“[Rhodes’s] finest work yet . . . Driftless is the best work of fiction to come out of the Midwest in many years.”—Chicago Tribune
 
“Set in a rural Wisconsin town, the book presents a series of portraits that resemble Edgar Lee Masters’s ‘Spoon River Anthology’ in their vividness and in the cumulative picture they create of village life.”—The New Yorker

“Encompassing and incisive, comedic and profound, Driftless is a radiant novel of community and courage.”—Booklist (starred review)
 
“A welcome antidote to overheated urban fiction . . . A quiet novel of depth and simplicity.”—Kirkus Reviews
 
“It takes a while for all these stories to kick in, but once they do, Rhodes shows he still knows how to keep readers riveted. Add a blizzard, a marauding cougar and some rabble-rousing militiamen, and the result is a novel that is as affecting as it is pleasantly overstuffed.”—Publishers Weekly

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781571318008
Publisher:	Milkweed Editions
Publication date:	09/23/2020
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	457
Sales rank:	794,752
File size:	892 KB

About the Author

As a young man, David Rhodes worked in fields, hospitals, and factories across Iowa. After receiving an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1971, he published The Last Fair Deal Going Down (Atlantic/Little Brown, 1972), The Easter House (Harper&Row, 1974), and Rock Island Line (Milkweed Editions, 2008). In 1977 a motorcycle accident left him paralyzed from the chest down. First published in hardcover in 2008, Driftless was David Rhodes’ first novel in thirty years. He has contributed to the New York Times. Rhodes lives with his wife, Edna, in rural Wisconsin.

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

Prologue
Chapter One, Thistlewaite County, 1977
Chapter Two, Violet and Olivia, 1997
Chapter Three Cora and Graham
Chapter Four Gail
Chapter Five Grief
Chapter Six Faith Keeps No Treasure
Chapter Seven Humped Floors
Chapter Eight Hot Milk
Chapter Nine Broken Things
Chapter Ten Hiring Help
Chapter Eleven A Gray Van
Chapter Twelve Epiphany
Chapter Thirteen Straight Flush
Chapter Fourteen Fire in the Field
Chapter Fifteen Snow
Chapter Sixteen Envy
Chapter Seventeen A New Song
Chapter Eighteen Remembered Love and Anger
Chapter Nineteen Fear
Chapter Twenty Reunion
Chapter Twenty-One The Meaning of Truth
Chapter Twenty-Two Fighting Dogs
Chapter Twenty-Three The Universal Acorn
Chapter Twenty-Four Insurgency
Chapter Twenty-Five New Love
Chapter Twenty-Six Spring
Chapter Twenty-Seven The Thief
Chapter Twenty-Eight Mushrooms
Chapter Twenty-Nine Breaking In
Chapter Thirty The River
Chapter Thirty-One Family
Chapter Thirty-Two Lawyers
Chapter Thirty-Three The County Fair
Chapter Thirty-Four Meeting at Snow Corners
Chapter Thirty-Five The Look of Death
Chapter Thirty-Six Finding July
Chapter Thirty-Seven Selling Land
Chapter Thirty-Eight Inside the Church
Chapter Thirty-Nine The Funeral
Chapter Forty Driftless

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

Accolades for Driftless:
Outstanding Achievement Award, Wisconsin Library Association’s Literary Award Committee California Literary Review Best Book
Booklist starred review and Editor’s Choice University of Wisconsin-Whitewater Chancellor’s Regional Literary Award All Iowa Reads selection, State Library of Iowa’s Center for the Book Midwestern Independent Booksellers Association (MIBA) Honor Award
Christian Science Monitor top ten books of the year

“Now, after what had to have been years of effort beyond the usual struggle of trying to make a good novel, we get [Rhodes’s] fourth, and, I have to shout it out, finest book yet. Driftless is the best work of fiction to come out of the Midwest in many years.”
—Chicago Tribune

“A profound and enduring paean to rural America. Radiant in its prose and deep in its quiet understanding of human needs.”
—Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

“Driftless is a fast-moving story about small town life with characters that seem to have walked off the pages of Edgar Lee Masters’s ‘Spoon River Anthology.’”
—Wall Street Journal

“Comprised of a large number of short chapters, the novel opens with a prologue reminiscent of Steinbeck’s beautiful tribute to the Salinas Valley in the opening of East of Eden, with a little touch of Michener’s prologue to his novel Hawaii. The book moves at a stately pace as it offers deep philosophy and meditative asides about life in Words, Wisconsin, in the Driftless zone, which is to say, about life on earth.”
—NPR, “All Things Considered”

“Few books have the power to transport the way Driftless does, and it’s Rhodes’ eye for detail that we have to thank for it.”
—Time Out Chicago

“A wry and generous book. Driftless shares a rhythm with the farming community it documents, and its reflective pace is well-suited to characters who are far more comfortable with hard work than words.”
—Christian Science Monitor, Best Novels of 2008

“A symphonic paean to the stillness that can be found in certain areas of the Midwest, The writing in Driftless is beautiful and surprising throughout, [and] it’s this poetic pointillism that originally made Rhodes famous.”
—Minneapolis Star Tribune

“[Driftless] presents a series of portraits that resemble Edgar Lee Masters’s 'Spoon River Anthology' in their vividness and in the cumulative picture they create of village life. Each of these stories glimmers.”
—New Yorker

“Rhodes consciously avoids drama to deliver a portrait of a real rural America as singular, beautiful and foreign as anywhere else.”
—Philadelphia City Paper

“Rhodes shows he still knows how to keep readers riveted. As affecting as it is pleasantly overstuffed.”
—Publishers Weekly

“Encompassing and incisive, comedic and profound, Driftless is a radiant novel of community and courage.”
—Booklist 2008 Editor’s Choice, starred review

“Though Driftless is a deeply contemporary tale—what it has to say about the way corporations treat small farmers is, for example, quite pressing—it also has the architectural complexity of the great 19th-century novels, but without the gimcrackery too often required to hold their stories together. It partakes as much of the moral universe of Magnolia as of Middlemarch. And it earns comparison to both.”
—Books & Culture

“Unique, funny, absorbing, at times frightening. A novel crafted by a real writer.”
—California Literary Review, Best Books of 2008

Editorial Reviews

After a 30-year absence from publishing due to a motorcycle accident that left him paralyzed, Rhodes is back with a novel featuring July Montgomery, the hero of his 1975 novel, Rock Island Line, which movingly involves him with the fates of several characters who live in the small town of Words, Wis. Through July, we meet Olivia Brasso, an invalid who loses her family's savings at a casino; parolee Wade Armbuster, who befriends Olivia after she is mugged; Winifred Smith, Olivia's new pastor; Jacob Helm, a widower who finds himself falling in love with Winnie; Gail Shotwell, a local musician who has an unusual reaction when her idol offers to record one of her songs; and Gail's brother, Grahm, and his wife, Cora, who blow the whistle on the milk cooperative that has been cheating them and other farmers. It takes a while for all these stories to kick in, but once they do, Rhodes shows he still knows how to keep readers riveted. Add a blizzard, a marauding cougar and some rabble-rousing militiamen, and the result is a novel that is as affecting as it is pleasantly overstuffed. (Oct.)

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Publishers Weekly

Winner of the Milkweed National Fiction Prize, Rhodes's first novel in over 30 years is set in a rural area of Wisconsin so remote and forgotten that it's left off the map. Most of the residents have chosen to be isolated from the world around them and one another. Nevertheless, their concerns-the meaning of spirituality, family, love, and desire-are global and universal. The half-dozen or so subplots include an elderly man overcoming his mistrust of the area's recent Amish immigrants, a farm couple battling corporate and government corruption, and a sheltered disabled woman whose life changes radically. In the end, it eventually becomes clear that July Montgomery, a loner with a secretive past, is the glue that holds the community together. The characters and their struggles come vibrantly alive, though Rhodes's didactic authorial voice at times overwhelms the narrative and seeps into the dialog. Recommended for regional and larger public libraries.
—Christine DeZelar-Tiedman

Library Journal

Rhodes's first novel in more than 30 years (Rock Island Line, 1975, etc.) provides a welcome antidote to overheated urban fiction. When folks have a drink in Words, Wis., it's generally coffee or hot water with lemon that they turn to. When they cuss, they say "drat." Life is slow and rural; it's farm country, and locals care about the rhythms of the seasons, their roots in the community and each other. All is not well, however, when the milk cooperative tries to increase its profit margins at the expense of honest farmers. That doesn't sit well with Grahm and Cora Shotwell, who try to expose the cooperative's machinations. This is but one episode among many, however, in a deliberately episodic novel. The lack of a central narrative thread makes it possible for Rhodes to introduce us in stages to the community's major players. We make the acquaintance of newly-minted pastor Winifred Smith, whose cryptic spiritual epiphany starts to inform every aspect of her life; of July Montgomery, who mysteriously showed up some 20 years ago and whose quiet devotion to farming conceals a tragic past; of Grahm's sister Gail, who works in the local plastics factory and plays bass in a band; and of sisters Violet and Olivia Brasso, the latter an 89-pound invalid who's emotionally rescued by roughneck Wade Armbuster through the unlikely medium of dogfighting. Things happen in Words, but in a decidedly slow way. Cora gets fired from her job, Winifred tries to explain the nature of her spiritual awakening, curmudgeonly Rusty Smith hires some Amish carpenters to finish up some work on his home. Most importantly, people learn to overcome their reticence, occasionally even opening themselves to the possibilityof falling in love. Olivia recognizes the essential stability of the community by declaring that "new is only old rearranged."A quiet novel of depth and simplicity.

Kirkus Reviews

By the end of the darkly rhapsodic novel Rock Island Line (1975), July Montgomery has suffered enough tragedies for several cursed lifetimes even though he is only 22. His creator, on the other hand, was riding high as each of his three novels met with acclaim. But Rhodes was about to face his own season of loss. Now, in a triumphant return after 30 years (see the adjacent "Story behind the Story" for details), Rhodes picks up the thread of July's life with deepened powers, writing not in shadow but in light. As for July, after two decades of drifting, he has finally found peace in the small town of Words, Wisconsin. Respected and cherished, he is the hub of this brimming novel, each spoke a suspenseful story line about the unexpectedly dramatic lives of the good people of Words. The compelling cast includes Graham, a farmer, and Cora, his whistleblower wife intent on exposing agribusiness corruption; Winifred, the high-strung pastor; and the incredible Brasso sisters: large, nurturing Violet and tiny, smart Olivia, who rules the book from her wheelchair. In vividly realized scenes involving family secrets, legal battles, gambling, and miracle cures, Rhodes illuminates the wisdom acquired through hard work, the ancient covenant of farming, and the balm of kindness. Encompassing and incisive, comedic and profound, Driftless is a radiant novel of community and courage.
— Donna Seaman; Booklist Starred Review, September 1, 2008

Rhodes's first novel in more than 30 years (Rock Island Line, 1975, etc.) provides a welcome antidote to overheated urban fiction. When folks have a drink in Words, Wis., it's generally coffee or hot water with lemon that they turn to. When they cuss, they say "drat." Life is slow and rural; it's farm country, and locals care about the rhythms of the seasons, their roots in the community and each other. All is not well, however, when the milk cooperative tries to increase its profit margins at the expense of honest farmers. That doesn't sit well with Grahm and Cora Shotwell, who try to expose the cooperative's machinations. This is but one episode among many, however, in a deliberately episodic novel. The lack of a central narrative thread makes it possible for Rhodes to introduce us in stages to the community's major players. We make the acquaintance of newly-minted pastor Winifred Smith, whose cryptic spiritual epiphany starts to inform every aspect of her life; of July Montgomery, who mysteriously showed up some 20 years ago and whose quiet devotion to farming conceals a tragic past; of Grahm's sister Gail, who works in the local plastics factory and plays bass in a band; and of sisters Violet and Olivia Brasso, the latter an 89-pound invalid who's emotionally rescued by roughneck Wade Armbuster through the unlikely medium of dogfighting. Things happen in Words, but in a decidedly slow way. Cora gets fired from her job, Winifred tries to explain the nature of her spiritual awakening, curmudgeonly Rusty Smith hires some Amish carpenters to finish up some work on his home. Most importantly, people learn to overcome their reticence, occasionally even opening themselves to the possibility of falling in love. Olivia recognizes the essential stability of the community by declaring that "new is only old rearranged." A quiet novel of depth and simplicity.
— Kirkus

A fast-moving story about small town life with characters that seem to have walked off the pages of Edgar Lee Masters's Spoon River Anthology.
— Wall Street Journal

A terrific novel. . . Rhodes tells the story without haste, much as he speaks — thoughtfully, with quiet insight. The characters' perceptions about the landscape, their lives and each other are continually arresting yet almost casually right on.
— Isthmus Quarterly

Set in a rural Wisconsin town, the book presents a series of portraits that resemble Edgar Lee Masters’s “Spoon River Anthology” in their vividness and in the cumulative picture they create of village life.
— New Yorker (December 1, 2008)

[Rhodes's] finest work yet. . . . "Driftless" is the best work of fiction to come out of the Midwest in many years.
— Alan Cheuse, Chicago Tribune

From the Publisher

In the Driftless region of Wisconsin, the rural town of Words is no longer on any map, but twenty-first-century concerns still manage to intrude. Lloyd James delivers a low-key yet deeply engrossing performance as the lives of the people are indelibly etched into our consciousnesses. James presents farmer Rusty Smith as a curmudgeon who eventually bites the bullet and hires local Amish carpenters. The portaits of James’s women characters are well done, especially those of new minister Winifred Smith’s and sisters Olivia and Violet Brasso. As Graham and Cora Shotwell, the couple caught in a Kafka-esque web for trying to expose a corrupt milk co-op, James is appropriately angry and perplexed. The pace is slow, the rhythms are easy, and James is top-notch. S.J.H. © AudioFile 2010, Portland, Maine

DECEMBER 2010 - AudioFile