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| ISBN-13: | 9780802121172 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Grove/Atlantic, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 05/13/2014 |
| Pages: | 208 |
| Sales rank: | 762,219 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.25(h) x (d) |
CHAPTER ONE
Tiny and his son Micah sat on the back porch watching the sun set behind the trees.
“Say you’re carrying something,” said Tiny.
“Like what?”
Micah was fourteen and wore a forest-green stocking hat, his hair like feathers around his calm brown eyes.
“Something of value,” said Tiny. “This ashtray here. Say this ashtray is of value.”
The astray was made of green glass with yellowed seashells glued to the rim. So old it actually might have been of value.
Micah picked it up and walked to the end of the porch and back.
“Good,” said Tiny. “Something of value you carry in front of you and never at your side.”
“I’ll remember.”
“Now say you get in a fight.”
“I won’t.”
“What you do is you put your head down and ram them in the solar plexus. It’s unexpected.”
“I wouldn’t expect it.”
“Well, no one does,” said Tiny. “Sometimes they faint. They always fall over. Oh, and never get a credit card.”
It was a cool night in May. The level light cast a red glow on the grass and trees, the house and the shed.
“Do you still want to go?” said Tiny. “You can call it off any time.”
“I’ve never been in an airplane.”
“We could get Paul Francis to take you up.”
“That’s not what I’m talking about,” said Micah.
Tiny nodded. “I just said that to be saying something.”
A red-tailed hawk came from the north and landed on a hardwood branch with new leaves.
“There’s your hawk,” said Tiny. “Come to say goodbye.”
•
Dan Norman walked out of his house carrying the pieces of a broken table. He and Louise still lived on the old Klar farm on the hill.
The table had fallen apart in the living room. It was not bearing unusual weight and neither Dan nor Louise was nearby when it fell. Just the table’s time, apparently.
A car pulled slowly into the driveway and a woman got out and stood in the yellow circle of the yard light. She had long blond hair, wore a pleated red dress and white gloves.
“You don’t remember me,” she said.
“I do,” said Dan. “Joan Gower.”
He shifted the table pieces over to his left arm and they shook hands.
“Did you know we get second chances, Sheriff?” said Joan.
“Yeah. I’d say I knew that.”
“He will turn again and have compassion upon us and subdue our iniquities.”
“I’m not sheriff anymore, though.”
The door of the house opened and Louise came out wearing a long white button-down shirt as a dress.
“Who are you talking to?”
“Joan Gower.”
“Really.”
Louise had tangled red hair, wild and alive with the light of the house behind her.
“Is this business?”
“I’m getting my son back,” said Joan.
“Give me those, love,” said Louise.
She took the table parts from Dan and headed for the hedge behind the house.
•
Louise put the wood in the trash burner and went on to the barn, the dust of the old farmyard cool and powdery on her feet.
Empty and dark as a church, the barn was no longer used for anything. Louise climbed the ladder and walked across the floor of the hayloft.
The planks had been worn smooth by decades of boots and bales and the changing of seasons. She sat in the open door, dangled her bare legs over the side, lit a cigarette, and smoked in the night.
Dan and Joan were down there, talking in the yard. Louise listened to the muted sound of their voices.
She saw Joan reach up and put her hand on Dan’s shoulder, and then his face. The gesture made Louise happy for some reason.
Maybe that it was beautiful. A graceful sight to be seen in the country, whatever else you might think of it.
•
Lyris and Albert slouched on a davenport smoking grass from a wooden pipe from El Salvador and reading the promotional copy printed on Lyris’s moving boxes.
Lyris was Joan’s other child——Micah’s half sister. At twenty-three she had just moved in with her boyfriend, Albert Robeshaw.
The boxes were said to be good for four moves or twelve years’ storage, and anyone who got more use out of them was directed to sign onto the company’s website and explain.
“As if anyone would do that,” said Albert.
"To whom it may concern," said Lyris.
"We move constantly."
"It’s a hard life. We love your boxes."
“So what are we doing?" said Albert.
“About what?”
“Are we going to see Micah?”
Lyris drew on the pipe. “The little scamper,” she said.
Joan had given her up for adoption at birth. She appeared at Joan and Tiny’s door when she was sixteen and Micah seven. When Joan went away Lyris raised Micah as much as anyone did.
•
Louise came down from the hayloft and walked back to the house. Dan made her a drink and opened a beer, and they faced each other across the kitchen table.
“What have we learned?”
Dan raised his eyebrows. “Sounds like Micah Darling’s going to live with her in California.”
“What’s that got to do with us?”
“I don’t know. Guess she just wanted to tell someone.”
“I saw her touch you,” said Louise.
“Did you?”
Louise picked up the bottle cap from the beer and flicked it at Dan.
“Yeah, man. Pretty sweet scene.”
Dan caught the cap and tossed it toward the corner where it landed on the floor by the wastebasket.
“Where were you?” said Dan.
“Up in the barn.”
“How was it?”
“The same. Good.”
•
Tiny was drinking vodka and Hi-C and watching the Ironman Triathlon on television when Lyris and Albert arrived. An athlete had completed the running part and staggered like a new colt.
“They ought to put him in a wheelbarrow or something,” said Tiny.
Lyris and Albert stood on either side of his chair, looking at the screen.
“Is there archery in this?” Albert asked.
Tiny laughed. “Hell no, there isn’t archery. You swim, ride a bike, and run. It all has to be done in seventeen minutes.”
“That can’t be right,” said Lyris.
“I’m sorry. Hours,” said Tiny.
“Where’s Micah?”
Tiny tipped his head back to gaze at the ceiling. “In his room. Packing his belongings.”
“How are you?”
“I’m all right.”
Albert sat down in a chair to watch TV, or watch Tiny watching TV. Lyris climbed the narrow stairs between pineboard walls lined with pictures that she had cut from magazines and framed.
Micah had Lyris’s old suitcase open on his bed and was folding clothes into it. The suitcase was made of woven sand-colored fibers with red metal edges. From the pocket of her jeans Lyris took out a folded sheet of paper and tucked it in the suitcase.
“Okay, boy, that’s my number,” she said. “You get into trouble, you need to talk, I’m here.”
“Who will call me boy in California?”
“No one. That’s why you shouldn’t leave.”
“Do you think so?”
She shrugged. “Go and see what it is.”
“Are airplanes loud?”
“You get used to it,” said Lyris. “Sometimes they kind of shake.”
“They shake?”
“Well, no. Rattle. Occasionally. From bumps in the clouds. But that’s nothing. If you get nervous just look at the flight people. No matter what happens, they always seem to be thinking, ‘Hmm-hmm-hmm, wonder what I’ll have for supper tonight.”
•
The hotel that Joan stayed in had a tavern with blue neon lights in the windows. She went in and sat at the bar and ordered a Dark and Stormy.
The bartender was a young woman in a black and white smock with horizontal ivy vines above the belt and black-eyed susans below.
“Are you here for the wedding?” she asked.
Joan explained about Micah——how she’d left him seven years ago and wanted a chance to make up for it.
“Oh my,” said the bartender. “That will be quite a change for everyone.”
“It will,” said Joan. “They all probably think it will be a big disaster.”
“Well, it seems brave to me.”
Joan took a drink. “It does?”
“Oh, yeah. Even kind of, what would you say, inspirational.”
“You are the sweetest girl,” said Joan.
“You look like someone on TV.”
“That’s ‘cause I am.”
“Sister Mia. On Forensic Mystic.”
Joan nodded.
“Oh my gosh,” said the bartender. “Would you autograph my hand?”
“I would be honored.”
“Say Sister Mia.”
Joan held the bartender’s hand palm up and using a purple felt pen wrote Sister Mia and drew a heart with an arrow through it.
“People will think I did this myself,” said the bartender.
“Why would you?”
Joan finished her drink and went to her room. It was on the second floor in the back, overlooking a pond with dark trees and houses all around. She turned off the lights in the room and stood on the balcony looking at the water.
•
Tiny made breakfast and Micah came downstairs to the smell of scrambled eggs and canadian bacon and coffee. They ate and Micah asked Tiny if he was going to fight with Joan and Tiny shook his head.
“I don’t think about her that much anymore.”
“You watch her show.”
“Sometimes.”
“You must think of her then.”
Tiny put pepper on his food from a red tin. “I have trouble enough following the plot.”
“I believe that.”
“You have to mind her,” said Tiny. “Maybe you think she owes you. It won’t work if you think like that. You have to mind her like you mind me.”
“I don’t mind you.”
“Use your imagination.”
“You seem more like a brother than a father to me,” said Micah. “And I don’t mean that bad.”
Tiny got up and carried his plate and silverware to the sink, where he washed and rinsed them and put them on the drainboard.
“I don’t take it bad,” he said.
•
Joan arrived in the middle of the morning, and Micah watched her from the window. She crossed the yard smiling, as if thinking it was not so different from what she remembered.
The three of them met on the front porch. For a moment they seemed to be waiting for someone to appear who could tell them what to do.
Then Joan cried, took Micah in her arms, and pressed her head to his chest. He was a head taller than she was.
“I can hear your heart,” she said.
“Come on inside,” said Tiny.
“You have to invite me.”
“I just did.”
“Come in, Mom,” said Micah.
Joan took a chair at the table. Her eyelids and lips were brushed with fine reddish powder, and her skin glowed like a lamp in the room.
“We had eggs and canadian bacon,” said Tiny. “Do you want some?”
“No thank you, I ate at the hotel,” she said quietly.
“How was it?”
“Fair.”
“Where you staying.”
“The Landmark Suites,” said Joan.
“Nice.”
“Oh! There’s the broom.”
“What?” said Tiny.
“I see the broom. I bought it, and now I’m looking right at it.”
“Yeah, we haven’t changed. It’s missing a few straws.”
Micah went upstairs to have a last look at his room. He thought he should feel sad, but he only wondered when he would see it again.
•
“And how is the plumbing business going?” said Joan.
Tiny explained how he lost the plumbing business. The pipes had burst in a house, and the house froze and fell in on itself. The insurance company came in and sued all the contractors.
“Was it your fault?”
“Any pipe you let freeze with water in it, that pipe’ll split. Who puts it in is immaterial. Could be Jesus, pipe’s going to break. Since then I’ve been moving things for people.”
“Do you need money?”
With his hands on the table, Tiny pushed his chair back and looked at her. “I have nothing against you. You want to do things for Micah, and I hope you can. But do I want money? Come on, Joan.”
“I’m sorry.”
“This is my house.”
“I know it.”
She apologized again, and he waved a hand as if to say it was done.
“You want to stay over? You can stay in Lyris’s old room.”
“We fly out of Stone City this afternoon,” said Joan. “Is she going to be here?”
“Her and Albert Robeshaw came over last night. She’s still kind of mad at you.”
“You can’t blame her,” said Joan.
“I don’t.”
•
Tiny’s mother arrived. Her ahadow loomed in the doorway and she yelled hello though Tiny and Joan were sitting right there.
She wore a large Hawaiian shirt, jeans with hammer loops, and Red Wing boots. People feared her, as if she had special powers, but she was just an old lady given to yelling at people and playing with their minds.
Joan stood and gave her a hug, which made her uncomfortable. It wasn’t that she didn’t like Joan, she just wasn’t used to being hugged.
Micah walked down the stairs sideways, dragging Lyris’s suitcase by the red plastic handle. The suitcase bumped down the stairs. The kitchen became crowded, and Tiny took the suitcase and led everyone out to the front yard. They gathered around Micah in the shadow of the willow tree.
“I’m going to miss you,” said Micah’s grandmother. “But you’ll be all right. There’ll be somebody there to help you when you run into trouble.
”
“I will,” said Joan.
“Besides you. There’s someone else.”
Tiny stood behind his mother, gazing absently into the panoramic view of her Hawaiian shirt. Her predictions never surprised him. She made lots of them.
The shirt was dark blue and green and depicted nightfall in an island village of palm trees and grass huts with yellow lights burning in the windows. A pretty place.
Then Micah put thumb and finger to the corners of his mouth and whistled. Pretty soon an old doe goat crept around the side of the house. Micah and Lyris had raised her——fed and tended her, anyhow——there wasn’t a lot of training involved.
The goat came soft-footed down the grass. The reds and whites of her coat had faded to shades of silver. She surveyed the visitors and then stared at Micah, as if to say, “Oh, wait a minute. You’re leaving? That’s what this is all about?”
Micah fell to his knees and roughed up the goat’s long and matted coat. You could see him trying not to cry. His lips trembled, his eyes blurred with tears. The goat stared with slotted eyes at the road that went by the house.
“This is harder than I thought it would be,” said Micah.
•
Tiny and his mother stood in the yard, watching Joan’s car go around the bend. A bank of blue and gray clouds moved in hiding the sun. Colette took out a pipe and a pouch of tobacco and proceeded to smoke.
“And then there was one,” she said. “You think he’s doing the right thing?”
“He might be.”
She walked off to her truck, and Tiny went into the house, closed the door, and walked up the stairs with his shoulders bumping the walls. Micah’s bed was made with a blanket of red and black plaid and a light blue pillow centered beneath the headboard. A hockey stick leaned in the corner, blade wrapped in frayed electrical tape, by an old poster from a movie about heroic dogs.
The bedsprings wheezed like an accordion as Tiny sat down at the foot of the bed. A car went by, the road became quiet, and light rain began to fall against the window.
He sat with his forearms on his knees and his hands folded, remembering when the goat was young, how she and Micah would dance around the yard. Then he got up, pulled the blanket tight at the corners, and left the room.
“Some writers are good at drawing a literary curtain over reality, and splashing upon the curtain all colors of their fancies. And then there are the writers who raise the veil and lead us to see for the first time. Tom Drury belongs to the latter, and is a rare master at the art of seeing. Reading Pacific makes me once again fall in love with Drury’s words, and his perception of a world that is full of dangers and passions and mysteries and graces.”—Yiyun Li
"A fine percussive beat sweeps the reader along . . . The always fresh perspective of this one-of-a-kind writer will have you responding like his character who 'laughed with surprise in her heart."—Kirkus Reviews
Barnes & Noble Review Interview with Tom Drury
Tom Drury walks into an unmarked bar. Previously, when he'd pass by on walks through his current neighborhood, Manhattan's Upper East Side, he thought it abandoned. But then he discovered it was just an unmarked bar with a Victorian interior that suggested a haunted house quality. Naturally, he was curious to investigate and thus decided it was an appropriate setting to discuss his fifth novel, Pacific, published by Grove Press.
Unmarked bars would fit comfortably into a Tom Drury novel, where vanishing field machinery, vandalized water towers, and strangely articulate electronics conspire to create a world that, as Daniel Handler pointed out in The New York Times Book Review, feels "as strange as the world and the great literature that helps us make our way through it."
The End of Vandalism, his first novel, released in 1994, was serialized in The New Yorker and is now considered a modern classic (GQ named it one of the fifty best novels of the past fifty years; a reviewer for The Boston Globe called it "certainly one of the funniest, most humane novels of the past quarter century").
Pacific is Drury's third novel to revisit many of the characters living in and around Grouse County, a tiny farm community that in some way resembles (but is not, he insists) the small Iowa town where he was born in 1956 (The second is Hunts in Dreams, released in 2000). Sheriff Dan Norman has retired; his redheaded wife, born Louise Montrose, has moved on from photography and now runs a thrift shop; Louise's onetime husband Tiny Darling is up to his usual small-time malfeasance, and a platinum-haired, Celtic-obsessed stranger named Sandra Zulma, who proves adept at wielding both swords and yardsticks, comes to town.
This time, however, Drury transplants several characters to Los Angeles (where he lived between 2004 and 2010). Joan, once a strident Christian, has become an actress in a new drama called Mystic Forensic and decides to have a second go at parenting Micah, her fourteen-year-old son with Tiny Darling (Micah's sister, Lyris remains in Grouse County). Micah's new coastal lifestyle includes drugs, Venice Beach, and a beautiful girl named Charlotte, who has "perfect eyebrows," drives a pickup truck that would not be out of place in Grouse County, and looks like one of the girls in the Boston Persuasion shoe commercial (which in fact, she turns out to be).
Before Tom Drury was a novelist, he worked as a reporter for several papers around New England. After he was a novelist, he worked as a writing instructor at Wesleyan University (where I was his student in both literary journalism and fiction writing during the mid-'90s), an editor on the foreign desk of the St. Petersburg Times, and an editor for the website of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. He now lives in Manhattan with his wife and daughter.
As it happens, my tape recorder is so sensitive that not only does it pick up our own conversation, but at the very same time that he is telling me that people speak in fragments, not purposeful dialogue good for exposition, it has also recorded fragments of dialogue from the surrounding tables. Transcribing the tape is not unlike being a character in a Tom Drury novel, and I feel like I may, at any time, uncover a fiendish plot. When I tell him about the ghost dialogue, he writes back, "You might be able to uncover a fiendish plot, but should you? I believe this was the plot of many Hitchcock films."
Our conversation at the unmarked bar included the comforts of illuminated appliances in darkened rooms, Celtic epics, and the difference between a sentence written by Tom Drury and one performed by Red Skelton. Ghost dialogue not included. —Amy Benfer
The Barnes & Noble Review: I just read all three Grouse County books back to back. The dialogue is similar. But The End of Vandalism feels so snappy, so perfectly stylized. In Pacific, the sentences between the dialogue felt more relaxed, maybe even a little mournful, or elegiac. How do you feel about the tone of this book?
Tom Drury: I think of the three Grouse County books as radically different in style from each other. In The End of Vandalism, there's always an outlet of humor. And while it was called deadpan humor, it is overtly funny and you don't find that so much in Pacific. Progressively, there is less in Hunts in Dreams and less in Pacific. I'm still keen to the humor of certain situations — like when the guy has sold the canoe out from the other guy, that made me laugh.
BNR: Ah, yes. The $900 canoe. He was just doing the guy a favor. Taking the canoe off his hands.
TD: As he says, it was a $900 canoe. We don't know what he got for it.
BNR: Presumably considerably less.
There might a kind of mournfulness, as you say, but it's more a seriousness. Or something. Even when we were editing The End of Vandalism, my editor, Veronica Geng, would say you don't want to feel like it has to be funny on every page. That's something I've taken to heart. I try to be interesting on every page, but not necessarily through humor.
BNR: That last scene in The End of Vandalism is both — funny as hell and also very sad.
TD: "The scientist dies"? Maybe that is a projection of what's coming.
BNR: "The scientist dies" — that's said in response to the television. In Pacific, you also have semi-sentient devices. A radio plays while one character is dying. Later, another radio seems to suggest a ghost. I found another seemingly astute television in The Black Brook. What narrative possibilities do you see in electronic devices? Is it just randomness or another outlet for humor? Or is it more of this sentient connection that allows you to at least suggest the possibility of, say, ghosts?
TD: What I like about TV and radio is that they allow you to bring all kinds of images and dialogues into the narrative where they serve a purpose just as if someone in the story were seeing or hearing them in real life. I don't think of mass media as sentient to the point of knowing who is in the room. It's more that people want to make sense of everything so that these random electronic messages can be interpreted by them as part of their stories. And mostly they should be random, and not all manipulated by the writer to make some point. The relationship should be a little mysterious to everyone.
BNR: To continue with the man vs. machine theme, Micah, the teenage boy in Pacific joins a group called the New Luddites while living in LA. One of the sweetest scenes in the novel is when a passing stranger translates the image of Micah and his new girlfriend, Charlotte, into Palmer cursive, a style of writing that has fallen out of fashion. But as in all your novels, technology seems rather friendly: Like Dan, who has always been comforted by the light coming off small appliances, Micah seems to find as much solace in "a friendly light shining from beneath the cupboards" as he later does looking off to the horizon at sunrise. Also the New Luddites protest itself — broadcasting the National over the school PA — is both literally using technology to disseminate art, and itself requires pretty decent hacking skills. It seems like you may be saying the technological world and nature don't have quite as many gripes with each other as it may seem. True?
TD: The technological world is so vast that it's hard to know what it's doing or what trouble it might cause. Lights are pretty low-tech and I think that in places where there is real darkness at night and lots of it they are welcome. More so by Dan than most, maybe. What the New Luddites do is of a different order. At one point I had them debating the use of the computer to undermine the computer, whether they could use it to that extent and still be square with their principles. I cut that part, but someone said you can't change the system if you won't go anywhere near it. And it's really more a question of how the technology is used. Micah tells the headmaster it's all about money and that the social network is a Trojan horse, which, because of cellphones, people no longer see what is in front of them. I think he's right about all these things. But when he needs to talk to Lyris near the end, he has to borrow someone's cellphone. Maybe it's like the vandalism of the first novel. Albert and his friends did not object to the water tower as a visual medium, they just wanted to paint their own words on it.
BNR: I can't decide if the use of drugs in this novel is another example of synthetic substitutes for emotion being valued just as much as their natural counterparts. But they often don't seem overtly negative — as one of the kids has it, these are "vision" as opposed to "metabolic" drugs and even though Micah is fairly troubled when he starts using them, there does seem to be a kind of mysticism, even spirituality to his drug use that harks back to a kind of old-school California drug subculture.
TD: I do think the drug use is a ritual of Micah's acceptance rather than something bad. It's how he and Charlotte find a connection. There's that line, "She really cared about you, making sure your high was okay." Drugs, alcohol included, can be useful as a way of helping characters reach a kind of emotionality or openness they might not otherwise have. Just like in life. Of course it can be overdone. Charlotte passes out in public sometimes, and Micah ends up drunk and confused as to whether his sister is in the Midwest or hiding under a lifeguard shack on the beach. But yeah there is a kind of spirituality going on, in the lines Micah sees among the stars and the sunrise he and Charlotte see after a night of drinking and running around.
BNR: To go back to Grouse County, Dan and Louise, who were the emotional heart of The End of Vandalism are back and still at the emotional center of Grouse County.
TD: They're not thirty anymore. And Louise has her night time worries. The childlessness that perhaps didn't mean so much to them when they were a young couple perhaps comes home to them. I very much found that Louise and Lyris were kind of gravitating towards each other because one doesn't have a daughter, and the other doesn't have a mother. That just seemed to happen as the narrative went. I think there's more of an emphasis on family, but at the same time, the family seems hard to achieve in this book.
BNR: But there are many functional families in this books, they just aren't usually the nuclear ones? For example, neither Lyris nor Micah have a great mother in Joan, but Louise is a mother to Lyris, and Lyris to Micah. Might it also be true that the families one chooses can sometimes be stronger than the ones one is born with, even if they are, as you say, hard to achieve?
TD: Yeah, that is an excellent point. At one point Micah was thinking that he did not blame Joan and Tiny for who they were as parents and that he would find his family wherever he went, in the people around him. This was when he is hanging out with Beth after they take painkillers together. I cut that thought of Micah's, too. It's interesting how many things that were cut speak directly to your questions. That's a good thing probably. Usually when I take out something like that it's because I think either the reader will know this from what is happening or, if not, saying it directly won't make it so.
BNR: I also sort of love that Tiny Darling's fatherly advice — hit him in the solar plexus! — turns out to be surprisingly practical. But Joan seems as damaging and incompetent as ever. Is this the difference between bad mothers and bad fathers?
TD: I think Joan is better than you think. A little better anyway. She lets Micah do pretty much whatever he wants, it's true, and some will see that as neglect. She seems somehow bound to break up a family whenever a child of hers arrives. But that little scene where she is helping him with his homework and they come up with The Age of Fabric to help him memorize the presidents. Or when she is telling him about the Olympic skater who once lived in their apartment building. Or how she owns up to having left him. I think that is an important moment because Micah is saying he did not view her departure as something that she did to someone, and she says, "To you, that's who it was done too." Sort of reminding him of his validity as an individual, which is a good thing for a kid to understand.
BNR: They're not in Grouse County anymore. But none of their families of origin back in Grouse County were that great either.
TD: It's one thing when you're estranged from your parents when you're in your late twenties, or in combat with them, as Louise was with Mary in EOV, but twenty years later, it's a different thing. And not as funny, and not as redeemable. You always think, "Well, there will always be time." And then time goes away.
BNR: Louise and Dan started out The End of Vandalism in their mid-thirties. So they are in their fifties, now? Are they your contemporaries?
TD: Yeah, roughly. More or less. That's how I think of them. I was thinking End of Vandalism plus seven years is Hunts in Dreams plus seven more years is Pacific. That wouldn't quite bring us up to now, but it brings us into the late 2000s. I had to ask myself things like, "Could Perry Kleeborg [Louise's boss at the photography studio] still possibly be alive?" And I thought, "No, no way. He's got to be dead."
BNR: But turning his photography studio into a thrift shop is such a nice gesture. It's a way to collect and archive the past.
TD: What you see of Grouse County in Pacific is about a movement away from the country and the little towns toward the medium-sized cities, which maybe — who knows? — is even sociologically correct. I can go into a certain place, and I can say, "There was a farm here, and a farm here, and a farm here, and they'r gone." Louise and Dan both work in the city. But there's just not as many country scenes. Which is partly ?cause, one thing in writing these, if I did something in The End of Vandalism, I don't want to do it again.
BNR: But you do repeat the characters. You are obviously striving for continuity on some level.
TD: They're the same characters in changing social structures and language. The End of Vandalism to me was kind of like a letter from somebody eccentric at home.
BNR: And by home you mean?
Someone living there. Living in Grafton. Calling it a letter from home makes it sound sweeter than it is. You get letters from home that are not sweet. And that are sardonic and somewhat cryptic.
BNR: You grew up in Iowa, right?
TD: It's up near Mason City. It's called Swaledale. It's got a population now of about 150. It had 220 when I was growing up. Very tiny. 220, I believe was the high mark. And that's when I was a kid.
My life in the town I grew up in was much quieter than The End of Vandalism. Part of the reason I think I wrote it was because it was too damn quiet when I was young, and I wanted people to come out and talk. And they do. There's so much dialogue in The End of Vandalism. It's almost like I wished that the dialogue would have been there.
BNR: Did you know any writers when you were growing up?
TD: I didn't even know what to read. I read True Grit. I read Nine Stories by Salinger. And I read S. E. Hinton, who I still think is really good.
BNR: Me, too. And there is a That Was Then, This Is Now reference in Pacific.
TD: I read those in high school. Then I went to college and took some journalism courses. I really, honest to God, didn't know what to read until I was out of college and living in Boston, and someone said, "Well, why don't you read Hemingway?" And I thought, OK. I guess I'll try this Hemingway fellow.
BNR: I've heard he's quite good.
TD: Yes, me too. So I just didn't know. Which I don't think is bad. Ultimately, it helps you to be original, to the extent that you are.
BNR: How old were you when you left?
TD: Twenty-four. I got a journalism degree at Iowa, I went out to the East Coast. I was doing clerical work in a law firm, in a big, tall building that I thought was thrilling. The wind would come off Boston harbor and the building would go back and forth and you'd be riding the elevator, scraping the walls, and I would think, "This is so great. This is so incredible." After living in a town of 150. I worked three newspaper jobs, culminating in the Providence Journal in '83? I wanted to try grad school, and Brown was right there.
BNR: Brown is very much known as an experimental program. But you are more realist.
TD: Here's the cool thing that I found. Bob Coover was very adept at dealing with writing of all kinds. The last interview we had before I graduated, he said, "You can do this. What else can you do?" And by "this," he meant a form of fiction that was sufficient, but not good.
The thing that I did was find that voice in The End of Vandalism. I thought, well, what can I do? I knew I had a sense of humor. You begin by thinking whatever you can do, that doesn't matter. That's not literature. Literature is this idealized thing that someone else does with all the skills that you don't have. I eventually realized the humor that I had could help create a style and a way of looking at things.
BNR: Since all the novels, at least, are written in the third person, the humor is the thing, to me, that shapes your point of view as the narrator. You are the one offstage setting up the jokes and things that the characters themselves don't get or don't necessarily see.
TD: Right. And sometimes many of the readers, too.
BNR: That sounds like more of this "deadpan humor" I hear so much about...
TD: That's what they all say...I don't know what they mean.
BNR:...That's what the kids say...
TD: I've never understood that. Red Skelton, whom you wouldn't remember...
BNR: I know of Red Skelton...
TD: OK, Red Skelton: not deadpan. We know that. There's this big kind of jokey style. But I don't know. Who writes that way? Maybe somebody. But I don't know who.
BNR: But your humor is all about the spaces between the words, which is what all literature is about.
TD: It's about being aware of the possibilities of change within in a sentence or within a scene. Sentences can start out very serious, and you might discover something funny or offbeat at the end. Same thing with scenes. Very few things are totally devoid of any possibility of humor. If you are aware of that possibility, and alive to the scene becoming that way, then it just happens naturally. That's what I feel living is like, too. I find a lot of things that make me smile or make me laugh over the course of the day.
It also has to do with a form of realism. You walk down the street, you don't hear any purposeful dialogue that would be good for exposition. All you hear is fractured bits, which is the way we speak to each other. I tried to be true to that. Always my fallback is, "What is life like?" Get as close to that as you can. As opposed to, "What is literature like?" I feel like, try using life as the model. You may end up with something interesting and different.
BNR: You were, in fact, my literary journalism teacher. I feel like part of your skill with dialogue comes from having once been a journalist.
TD: Yeah, I'm with you. I used to love working with a tape recorder. It's not a bad thing to do if you want to learn how to write dialogue. I don't do non-fiction anymore. Eventually you just feel constrained by the facts. You want to go where the words take you, and people's actual lives don't always conform. And you can't know them that well.
With this book in particular, there was a real effort to cut it to the bone with narrative and get it down to the things I could still be interested in reading after I had read it eighty times. Also, I have been working on a screenplay for The Driftless Area. Coming off that, you really have to think about, what is this doing? Why is this here? If it's not here for a reason, cut it. Which is totally antithetical to The End of Vandalism, which was all about, And I'll tell you something else... that you don't need to know!
BNR: Given your skill with dialogue, I had been meaning to ask you if you had done work for TV or screenplays. And the answer seems to be yes.
TD: We have the screenplay. It's finished. It's slated to shoot in late summer. I wrote it with this great director, Zachary Sluser. So the answer is, yeah. But I love the power of fiction. In a screenplay, you write a scene and you think, "This is going to require so much." The collaboration of many, first of all. And it's tricky. For example, to do the car accident that is in Pacific, it would be expensive, you know.
BNR: Michael Bay expensive! And you don't have to think about that when you are a fiction writer.
TD: Not at all! It's like, "I made a car accident today! And it didn't cost me a dime!"
BNR: So you wrote Pacific when you were actually living in LA, right?
TD: No, I was living here. [New York City].
BNR: So once again, like writing about Iowa, a letter from a place you had already left.
TD: See, and I don't say Iowa. I never say Iowa. You said Iowa.
BNR: Sorry. Grouse County.
TD: It's OK. But the important thing to me is that to me these places are not these places. This is not supposed to be the Midwest, or Iowa, or Midwesterners or Iowans. It's supposed to be people that exist in my head.
I always feel that way when I am writing about a place. I use an actual, physical location as a kind of a stage. Just like a playwright might have a favorite stage. And then you'll come back and you can do anything there. But the characters, they're not supposed to represent. They're just supposed to be, and hopefully they are spontaneous and new. I'm not trying to say, "This is what the place is like." Or, "This is what the people are like." Because I don't think that's the way it is, or they are. They are made up.
BNR: There is a certain sensibility that goes with each place, whatever that place is. And there is a certain collision of sensibilities that comes from relocating the characters from Tom Drury's Grouse County to, well, Tom Drury's Los Angeles...
TD: No ambiguity there, yes, it is Los Angeles. It's Santa Monica.
BNR: One of the biggest differences between Grouse County and Los Angeles seems to be the intrusion — and possibility — of strangers. When a stranger shows up in Grouse County, she is literally trying to kill people. When Micah arrives in LA, he can't even imagine enough people to fill up all the buildings. But the strangers don't seem so bad: they are also the ones who make room for a stray like Micah. Others have suggested that this novel makes LA into another small town. What contrasts do you see between Tom Drury's L.A. and Tom Drury's Grouse County?
TD: There's a lot more for a kid to do in Los Angeles. One of the things Micah tells Thea he used to do is walk along the abandoned railroad tracks. Here there are kids and mobility and parties and drugs and horses and mansions both perfect and falling apart. I think both places at least in this novel are very tolerant of strangers. The difference lies not so much in the place as in the stranger. Micah is trying to find an exciting life and Sandra is caught in some kind of mythological time loop that makes her sense of reality absurd at first and finally very dangerous. Still, everyone is courteous to her, and everyone is always offering her clothes to wear.
BNR: And Joan, the Bible thumper and erstwhile mother, is now an TV actress on Forensic Mystic, or Mystic Forensic...
TD: I can't remember either. BNR: I am actually obsessed with Forensic Files. That's the only trash TV I watch.
TD: What? Forensic Mystic?
BNR: No, Forensic Files. True crime.
TD: We don't get TV, but I just noticed through ads and stuff that there's all these shows about these women who have, like ESP, and solve crimes and things. Also I just like the rhyme of Forensic Mystic It's sort of a nod to "Disco Mystic," which is a song by Lou Reed, many years ago.
BNR: You have a lot of song lyrics in this novel.
TD: There's not so many. There's the National ["Fake Empire"]. Thing with song lyrics is you have to go track down the copyright.
BNR: You don't have to track them down. You can mishear them. There is a long history of mishearing song lyrics, too.
TD: True. I had a thing in, I forget what book. Remember Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers had a song called "Islands in the Stream"?
BNR: Oh, and it was about the Hemingway book, too, wasn't it?
TD: Hell if I know. I referred to that song that the character always thought of as "Island Dentistry." People like to say, "Well, it felt really timeless, but then you had the National in it." Well, OK. Doesn't bother me.
BNR: The National are already timeless themselves, goddammit. There is the kid singing M. C. Hammer's "Hammertime" in The End of Vandalism. And I swear Micah and Charlotte are listening to Janelle Monae in the club. "Tightrope," which came out in 2010.
TD: "The Tightrope" is Leon Russell. Seventies.
BNR: Transpositions and mishearings indeed. It is also Janelle Monae. Look it up. I swear you will like it. My copy of The End of Vandalism is from the year I took your class. It was annotated by college me. As it turns out, adult me does not find what college me has to say about your novel particularly interesting.
TD:That's sort of how the Celtic aspect came about. I found a book called the Tain, which is a translation by Thomas Kinsella of an Irish epic called the Tain Bo Cuailnge. It was annotated by with little underlines and marginal comments. The comments had the i dotted with a hollow circle, which made me think, This is a woman who is writing this.
BNR: Hollow dots over the i's are very much a teenage girl thing.
TD: There were these passages that were about sex and it would say in the margin, "Sexual innuendo?" And I was thinking, Innuendo? What are you talking about? That's sex! But it made me think about this person, who, at a very young age, got very deeply into these epics and took it into herself and it became her reality. And it made me think, "What would happen if that had a deep effect on somebody?" I don't know if you can think of games you played as a kid?
BNR: Well, Dungeons and Dragons is a classic touchstone for people my age. There is a Sam Lipsyte story about it. Paul LaFarge wrote on it, too.
TD: But even before that. Playacting or running in the yard. Swordplay with sticks. Like, kids, like, below ten. And then maybe somebody eventually grows out of it. And maybe the other person doesn't grow out of it at the same time. And maybe that other person goes farther into it. That's what I thought about the character of Sandra. The characters have some sort of weird protectiveness of her. There's some sort of general distrust of law enforcement, I think.
BNR: Which is ironic, given that the most long- running hero of the Grouse County books is Dan the sheriff. But there is that line about him saying him not trusting the rules now that he is no longer enforcing them. But this book is full of people breaking the rules. There are so many betrayals. Infidelity, all the way through.
TD: It's approached in different phases. Dan, ten percent. Joan and Gray, the sex-addled screenwriter...
BNR: About whom we get the classic line, "I thought you could count on men to be callous and evasive..."
TD: Right. I thought that was kind of true. I'm not sure if it is, but I kind of hope it is.
BNR: That you can count on men to be callous and evasive? Or that you can't?
TD: That you can't. Joan thought Gray would be easy to sleep with and forget because, in the way of men, he would want to sleep with and forget her. Instead he begins following her around like he's insanely devoted to her even though it seems to be her audition reel that he's really in love with.
I think Louise and Dan kept on OK. Somebody said to me, "Oh, you hate to see Dan and Louise flailing." But I don't know if they are flailing. I always feel like people are always saying my characters are "flailing" or "bumbling." And I think, "What are their lives like? Who are these people who have these perfect lives in which they never flail or bumble?" Really. I hate to analyze my own book.
BNR: You are allowed to analyze your own book!
TD: I always go back to Huck Finn as a character. He didn't expect anything. He didn't have any Victorian expectations of a good or proper life, and so he was very well equipped to deal with whatever happened. A lot of my characters are the same way. Their feelings aren't hurt when things go wrong, because they don't have a sense of entitlement about things going well.
BNR: Many writers will go back and forth between writing full-time and teaching. But you see to go back and forth between writing novels and journalism and...
TD: Day jobs.
BNR: Are there day jobs that you have found help or hinder your writing?
TD: Here's the thing: I was never writing when I was doing any of those jobs. I was writing a little bit when I was at Wesleyan. But I wasn't writing when I was doing journalism. What it does to your writing is stop it. That's my advice.
BNR: So the advice is marry a financier?
TD: No, the advice is: Keep a damn low overhead. I don't regret any of it. I was able to be a more present father to my child, my girl. It's hard to argue with that. And you think, well, if the world was deprived of two Tom Drury novels, the world will probably get over it. I'm not unhappy having five novels. That ain't bad. Go back to the kid in the little town of 150 and say, "Hey, kid, you're going to write five novels." It's OK with me.
— June 14, 2013
Book award season is upon us! Last week, under a new set of rules, the National Book Awards released four nominee longlists for the first time ever. This is fantastic news for book-lovers, as it gives us a chance to sample the work of double the authors. Without further ado, the talented authors who were recognized […]
