When the light is just right, you can see two faint scars crossing Tom Drury's face like insignias of the hardscrabble lives that populate his fiction. In well-worn flannel and denim, with scuffed boots, he looks like a weatherbeaten fisherman out of a Hemingway novel. He wears a silver ring of skulls on his right hand, a kind of memento mori from a trip out West. Looking at Tom Drury is like looking into the face of inevitability--the results of life's endless dishing out of erosive adversity, like the action of water against stone. But just as the droll Drury humor brightens the spirits of his enchantingly compromised characters, the setting of our interview--an Indian restaurant just off the impressive town green in well-to-do, WASPy Litchfield, Conn.--casts a comic light on this master of American dead-pan. Drury, who is married and has a daughter, is accompanied this day by Pogo, a very, very friendly black Labrador.
No other current American novelist has Drury's unique voice. With a kind of detached amusement, he depicts Americans adrift in a surreal, mutating socio-economic landscape, his sentences mixing the plainspoken with the absurd: "In the afternoon they went to an auction house called the Palace to find a goat." "Dr. Palomino wandered through the cool hallways of his house, drinking scotch from a glass." "I was stripping paint with a heat gun and now I think the house is on fire." The theme of people out of time, caught between their memories of an industrial (or even agrarian) culture and the stark, unfamiliar reality of one driven by electronic data transfer, recurs throughout Drury's novels. "The electronic advancement that we have been privileged to witness in the last several years requires some kind of scrutiny," Drury says in a clear, quiet voice. "Someone should ask, 'Are they really advances, or not?' " The latest, Hunts in Dreams (Houghton Mifflin), as well as Drury's two previous novels, The End of Vandalism (1994) and The Black Brook (1998), explore this question at length, through the lives of Drury's hard-struggling characters. The protagonist of Hunts in Dreams, Charles "Tiny" Darling (the Darling family first appears in The End of Vandalism) is a well-meaning but apparently hapless Everyman, barely able to keep his own family together. While meandering through Drury's vividly imagined Grouse County in his truck (which bears the goofy slogan "There Goes Charles the Plumber"), Charles seems to stumble into a never-ending series of pitfalls that he is ill-equipped to negotiate.
But this is part of Drury's subtle design: his characters' outward awkwardness belies an inner perseverance, one that almost immediately snares a reader's sympathy. "I don't think of my characters as bumbling," Drury said. "I think that trouble is what drives a novel, both big troubles and small troubles, and whatever people try to do in life, there are a series of stumbling-blocks in the way, and I think that makes for interesting reading. I think of them as doing their best with the roadblocks that they're given." Such a view is not without humor, however, an inclusion which the author claims is deliberate. "That's just my observation of the world, it just works its way into the book. There's a comic strain because things seem funny to me. So I try to put them down that way."
The author's use of the word "strain" is also deliberate. The tension between the comedy he finds in modern America and his awareness of the difficulties it often arises from gives him a certain pause. He is pensive about the complexities of modern life, particularly (though not exclusively) in rural settings. "In writing about a rural place, I draw on my memories of how it was," says Drury, 43, who grew up in Iowa. "But I try to make the characters people of 1999 or 2000, so there's a kind of displacement that goes on just in the imagination of the landscape, because you're putting modern people into something you remember from a long time ago, which creates an interesting kind of tension--or I hope so, anyway.
"Also, I think there's an interesting question," Drury continues. "I tried explaining this once on BBC Radio in London, how The End of Vandalism was really about the changing of an economic way of life, and how that can leave people adrift when the means of production move on. It didn't go over very well, but I think it's something I have in mind when I write: What happens when our commercial world moves onto something new and we're the same people, and how do we respond? I think it's funny, and it helps create the sorts of situations I write about."
In Drury's fiction, the tenuousness of family life is both organic and inevitable. "In some ways, the dissipation of the family, the moving out into an independent existence, is everyone's trip," he claims. "In writing about that, you're just talking about the natural path of life, away from the group that you started with." The characters he portrays trying bravely to hold their crumbling families together have a kind of faith, "a demonstration of a belief in an idea. Emily Dickinson has a p m that I've always loved, and it goes something like this: 'The absence of belief/ makes the behavior small/ Better an igneous fatuus [or a false light]/ than no illum at all.' It's like saying, is there a God or is there not? We don't know. Assume there's not. People are probably better for behaving as though there were. Is the family a sustainable unit? Maybe it's not. But if you act as if it were, people would probably behave more decently toward each other."
Hunts in Dreams marks a return to familiar Drury territory, the bleak American heartland of dead farms, tornad s and families on shaky ground. "I'd always intended to come back to Grouse County in my third book," Drury admits. "I thought I'd write The Black Brook outside of it to give those characters some breathing time and then return to it to see how they were doing. And I may do it again." With its Scandinavian family names and familiar-sounding towns like "Margo," Grouse seems to be situated somewhere in the Dakotas, in the middle of the Great Plains.
"I'm not trying to make statements about the Midwestern town or the New England town," Drury says. " I think the settings could be different, but the characters would essentially remain the same. I tend to go back to what I remember best, and I think you remember best what you grew up with, because you're seeing the world in a different way, and the scenes are imprinting themselves on your memory more deeply." Drury's fictional Grouse County seems to have resonant properties for a wide variety of readers. "Sometimes people from Vermont or upstate New York have said to me, 'You know, Grouse County reminds me a lot of the town where I'm from.' And that makes sense to me, because Grouse County is meant to be universal."
Indeed, the Midwest is not the only setting for Drury's novels. The Black Brook, which features an inept man on the run from a Providence, R.I., gangster, makes for an interesting foray across genre boundaries, with Drury pondering another conundrum of modern life, namely, the popular perception of a given subject, and the subject-in-itself. "The Black Brook d s mix genres," he concedes. "I wanted to draw upon both what people know about the world of so-called organized crime, and what they know about popular representations of it. It borders on the satirical, and that was intentional, because it seemed interesting and funny to take people's expectations head-on and give them something other than what they'd expected." The response, according to the author, was mixed: "People who've read it as a crime novel have been somewhat disappointed, because it's not really a crime novel. It's about someone's life winding down, and the crime is just one aspect of the trouble that the protagonist has brought upon himself. The people that he knows and loves are more troubling than the criminal elements he encounters, which are fairly comic in themselves."
No matter where it is located, the small town is Drury's ground zero. "I tend to write about towns, because that's what I remember best," he explains. "You can put a boundary on the number of characters you insert into a small town. I tend to create a lot of characters, so this is a sort of restraint on the character building I do for a novel. Also, it gives the narrator a sense of omniscience, because it's natural that people in a small town know a lot about each other, or at least think they do, and they may be wrong. So the narration is free to delve into history and the pasts of various characters." The concept of a small town out of time points up a recurrent theme in Drury's books: the presence of the past. Like dipus, Drury's characters are often incapable of freeing themselves from their histories (Hunts in Dreams opens with Charles Darling vainly trying to get back a vintage shotgun his stepfather was forced to give up 30 years before). "The past has an undeniable grip on everyone, except, perhaps, amnesiacs," says Drury. "Once I had a newspaper editor who told me, 'When you're writing a big story, don't sit there poring through your notebook. Write the thing as you remember it. Memory is a great editor.' Every writer should hear that. Don't go back to the notes for a while, just tell the story as clearly and simply as you can. The scenes I write about are things that I've remembered for years."
After graduating from the University of Iowa with a journalism degree in 1980 ("I knew people in the Iowa Writers Workshop, but I didn't attend it myself"), Drury moved East, and went through a series of newspaper jobs: first for the Danbury News-Times in Danbury, Conn.; then for the Litchfield County Times in New Milford; then for the Providence Journal. Then, in 1985, he got into the graduate writing program at Brown. "It was the one place I applied to, and I just moved across town to Brown," he said. "I worked with a couple of very fine teachers, Meredith Steinbach and Robert Coover, and it was a great time. And it helped that I was able, during that time, to send stories to major magazines; even though they were rejected, the rejections were kind, and encouraging."
In the late '80s Drury had his first short story published in Harper's, followed shortly by another in the North American Review; he also scored two pieces in the New Yorker--without, he emphasizes, any sort of "ins" from his journalistic background. "My longest association with a magazine was with the New Yorker, and I just sent a story in cold to them. In working as a journalist, what helped me the most was the opportunity to meet many people, and talk to them and hear their stories as they told them. So it was the experience, rather than connections, that I got out of it. You pick up the cadence of how people talk, how they skirt around certain things. I think that doing a lot of interviews is a great education for a fiction writer.
"After I had two stories in the New Yorker, I was contacted by an agent who's been my agent ever since, and extraordinarily helpful--Sarah Chalfant at the Wylie Agency. We've been together since, oh, '90 or '91." With Chalfant's support, Drury forged an enduring relationship with his publisher, Houghton Mifflin, which has published all his books. Drury's editorial references read like a Who's Who of the company.
"Pat Strachan [the editor of Hunts in Dreams] came aboard at Houghton the last couple years. Dawn Sefarian was my editor for part of The Black Brook, and Hilary Lifton was my initial editor at Houghton, when she was working for Seymour Lawrence." (The End of Vandalism was originally published under Lawrence's imprint at HM). "When Sam died, just as The End of Vandalism was being published, the writers that he had went directly to Houghton," Drury says.
As far as future plans go, the author plans to keep producing novels--he declines to comment with any certainty on returning to journalism or going into teaching. He also declines to comment on his work-in-progress, though not without good reason. "Everything that's happened to me in publishing has driven me closer to the work. One thing I've learned: when I'm being published, it's best to be already involved in a new work, because it gives you something to think about other than what's going on with the book as it goes out to the stores and gets reviewed and so on. That's the main lesson that I've drawn, and it applies to all my books. Stay with the work." This is the doggedness of Charles "Tiny" Darling, the plumber who hunts in his dreams--except that Drury, it seems, has found his prey.
