The End of Vandalism Read online

  Praise for The End of Vandalism

  ‘A major figure in American literature, author of a string of novels without a dud in the bunch … Drury gives us the wondrous and engaging stuff of real storytelling’

  DANIEL HANDLER, NEW YORK TIMES

  ‘Brilliant, wonderfully funny … It’s hard to think of any novel – let alone a first novel – in which you can hear the people so well. This is indeed deadpan humor, and Tom Drury is its master.’

  ANNIE DILLARD

  ‘What excellent champagne Tom Drury is. He makes you feel smarter and funnier than you have any real right to. Under his spell you can appreciate both the scary emptiness and the scary fullness of your life, and when you’ve finished the bottle you wish you’d had more. Drury is a big-time American talent.’

  JONATHAN FRANZEN

  ‘Some writers are good at drawing a literary curtain over reality, and splashing upon the curtain all the colours 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.’

  YIYUN LI

  ‘Here’s an author who sees and hears what others either miss or fail to note the significance of.’

  RICHARD RUSSO

  ‘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

  ‘Although Drury has been compared to Garrison Keillor and Raymond Carver, he’s really in a class of one.’

  LOS ANGELES TIMES

  ‘Drury’s fiction is chockablock with … tiny epics unfurling and resolving in quick, universally funny vignette’

  BOSTON GLOBE

  ‘Extraordinary … This is a quiet book that grows in emotional resonance.’

  PUBLISHERS WEEKLY on The End of Vandalism (A Best Book of the Year)

  ‘An endlessly entertaining tapestry of human comedy and small-town living.’

  BOOKLIST on The End of Vandalism

  ‘Miraculous … reads like life itself … Drury builds a world in rural Iowa where we move in and settle and it feels so real, so plain, yet so absorbing it might be a memory of home.’

  MEN’S JOURNAL on The End of Vandalism

  ‘Remarkable … Every so often a debut novel appears that simply stuns you with the elegance and beauty of its writing … A+’

  ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY on The End of Vandalism

  ‘Breathtaking … A remarkable achievement … At once funny, sad, and touching … Drury’s alchemy draws on the best of Keillor and Carver to produce a new alloy.’

  NEW YORK NEWSDAY on The End of Vandalism

  The End of Vandalism

  Tom Drury

  TO CHRISTIAN

  I would like to thank Robert Gottlieb, Sam Lawrence, Sarah Chalfant, Hilary Liftin, Deb Garrison, and Dusty Mortimer-Maddox. Special thanks to Veronica Geng, for advice, encouragement, and brilliance from the start.

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction by Jon McGregor

  Epigraph

  PART I WORLD OF TROUBLE

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  PART II HEAVEN, HELL, ITALY

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  PART III LOVE REBEL

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  Characters

  Copyright

  I HAVE LOST THINGS:

  An Introduction to Tom Drury’s The End of Vandalism

  by Jon McGregor

  First, a warning.

  If you read The End of Vandalism you will become one of those people who try and foist it upon other people, 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.

  The advocates of Tom Drury’s work have a problem: his novels look very similar to many other quietly-spoken realist novels of the rural American mid-west, and there’s 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 in interviews of drawing on his own childhood memories – he grew up in Iowa – while setting these stories in the present day. So there is a kind of dislocation; an often 1950s or 1960s sensibility dropped into a 1990s social landscape. ‘Family agriculture seemed to be over,’ the narrator notes at one point, ‘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 just that little bit sideways.

  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 which 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 Tom 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. The stories are often not being told for the first time, and have the air of being honed in the retelling. (As does, of course, 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 eighteen-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.)

&nbs
p; These stories are both 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 sixty 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 do sometimes forget to mention that there is a great sadness at its heart. When it comes, after much patient accumulation of 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 seventeen years later, when we meet these same characters again in Tom Drury’s fifth novel, Pacific. Forget all that stuff about the healing power of time, Drury tells us, quietly. 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 home-owners 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 Tom Drury’s carefully worked sophistication that it is not.)

  Complicit? Well, yes. If you read this book properly, with something approaching the same patience and empathy and open-heartedness which 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 unlikeable 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 which 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.

  JON MCGREGOR

  NOVEMBER 2014

  If you do not attain happiness, always remember that you are on a good path, and try not to leave it.

  —the elder Zosima, The Brothers Karamazovv

  PART I

  WORLD OF TROUBLE

  ONE

  ONE FALL they held the blood drive in the fire barn at Grafton. Sheriff Dan Norman was there mainly as a gesture of good will, but one of the nurses didn’t make it, so Dan agreed to place the gauze in the crook of everyone’s arm. “And I thank you,” he would say.

  It was early afternoon when Louise Darling came in. Dan knew her somewhat. Tiny Darling was along too—her husband. Dan thought Tiny had done some break-ins at Westey’s Farm Home on Highway 18. There was no real proof.

  Louise had a red scarf over her hair. She removed her CPO coat so they could draw her blood. She wore a dark green T-shirt with a pocket. Dan admired her long white wrists and pressed the square of gauze to her pulse.

  “I thank you, Mrs. Darling,” he said.

  Then came Tiny. He had red hair, and a tattoo of an owl on the back of his hand. “You ought to be sending this blood to Port Gaspar,” he said.

  “Where?” said Dan.

  “Port Gaspar,” Tiny repeated. “The Navy sold the Eskimos a load of frozen salmon that turned out to be poisoned. So now they’re sick. They’ve got blood poisoning. And guess what the Navy does. Of course, they send in some lawyers to threaten the Eskimo community.”

  “Where is Port Gaspar?” said Dan.

  “In the South Pole,” said Louise. She had large green eyes and faded freckles. “We heard the report on the radio. It might not have been the Navy, but they came on Navy boats.”

  “As observers,” said Tiny. “They rode on the decks in their own little section, cordoned off with cords. Now the Eskimos need to have their blood flushed out.”

  Sheriff Dan Norman released Tiny’s arm and spoke to Nurse Barbara Jones. “Where does this blood go, anyway? All to Mercy?”

  “That’s right,” she said, “but I’ll tell you what. One time my second cousin got blood-poisoned. You can’t mess with it. Dan, you know her—my cousin Mary.”

  “Mary Ross,” said Dan.

  “Mary Jewell,” said the nurse. “Now, her mother was a Ross—Viola Ross. She was first cousins with Kenny Ross, who went to Korea. She couldn’t even walk across the room.”

  Louise Darling straightened her coat and tilted her head to the side. “I’m not sure if these were actual Eskimos,” she said.

  “It was cold enough to be Eskimos,” said Tiny. “Those lawyers said, Any more complaints, we’re taking down this whole town with a snowplow.’”

  “Their houses were made of snow,” said Dan.

  “Evidently,” said Tiny.

  Dan Norman next ran into Tiny Darling at a fight that happened one Sunday night at the Lime Bucket tavern. Dan had especially disliked bar fights ever since the time he got stabbed in the back with a pool cue and ended up going to a chiropractor instead of being outdoors all that summer. The chiropractor kept a bottle of vodka on a big safe behind his desk and insisted on being called Dr. Young Jim because, he said, his deceased father had been known as Dr. Old Jim. This time Tiny had Bob Becker by the hood of a red sweatshirt and was knocking his head against the handles of a foosball machine.

  Dan collared Tiny and pulled him outside. The first snow of the year had begun and they could see it falling at a slant all up and down the empty street. Tiny was alert but quite drunk. From what Dan had been able to find out, the fight had been over whether Tanya Tucker was washed up in her career, with Tiny taking the position that she was not.

  In the sheriff’s cruiser Dan and Tiny headed southwest on the Pinville blacktop, toward the lockup at Morrisville. About halfway there Tiny took a swing at Dan, and Dan had to pull over, get Tiny out, put the handcuffs on him, and stuff him in the back of the cruiser.

  “I always thought you were smart,” said Dan through the cage. “Come to find out I
’m sadly mistaken.”

  “My arms are going out of their sockets,” said Tiny.

  “Just as well be smacking your own head on the handles,” said Dan.

  A long silence followed. “You have snow on your hat,” said Tiny.

  Dan slowed for a raccoon groping its way across the road. “We know it was you that broke in at Westey’s,” said Dan. “Pretty clumsy on that door, by the way. But it’s beside the fact, since we’re not going to prosecute, so I don’t really know why I bring it up.”

  Tiny laughed. “How tall is this cruiser?” he said. “A foot and a half?”

  The lights were low at the jail in Morrisville, and inside, the two deputies and some of their friends were projecting slides of nudes onto a map of the county. “I wish I lived on Floyd Coffee’s farm tonight,” said Deputy Earl Kellogg, Jr. Dan told them to cut it out and take Tiny Darling and put him in a cell. Then he sat down to do the paperwork.

  “Dopers are out there pushing dope,” said Tiny. “People stabbing that guy in the alley behind the bank. On the other hand is me, who gave blood.”

  “What’s your real name, Tiny?” said Dan.

  “Charles,” said Tiny. “I’m in the plumbing supply.”

  “What a lie,” said Earl Kellogg. “Dan, Ted Jewell’s daughter called. I forget her name.”

  “There’s Shea and there’s Antonia,” said Ed Aiken, the other deputy.

  “All right,” said Earl. “The junior class there at Morrisville-Wylie is having a dance against vandalism, and this Shea Jewell said they want you to be a chaperon. They had Rollie Wilson from the EMTs, but you know Wilson’s had that fire.”

  “We’ll see,” said Dan.

  “It’s semi-formal,” said Earl.

  Dan unplugged the projector, took the slides, and left. It was still snowing. He took a roundabout way back to Grafton and found himself coming up on Tiny and Louise’s place. Their yard light blinked through the trees. Tiny and Louise rented the white farmhouse that used to be the Harvey and Iris Klar place and was still owned by the Klars’ daughter Jean, who lived thirty miles away, in Reinbeck, and had a job that had something to do with the brick and tile company there.