"Louise divorced Tiny that spring and found herself unable to watch television in a satisfying way"--such sardonic hints of contained disturbances suffuse a wonderful depiction of Grouse County, Iowa. The time is contemporary, the setting rural, and Drury populates the plat with people who mildly complain about their lives and local affairs. The scandal that sent Tiny packing was his trashing of a school's antivandalism exhibit; Louise then marries sheriff Dan Norman. The lives of the three meander over a few years and through about 30 other characters, and they absorb the strangenesses quotidian events deal out: the prank of painting a water tower, an abandoned baby, horses walking backward, the wreck of Dan's trailer home, and centrally, Louise's postpartum blues following her delivery of a stillborn. But more significant than the direction in which events trend is the imagery of the landscape and the quizzical, semiresigned comments the inhabitants make about it and each other. In this, Drury strikes gold, developing a personality or a scene in simple, unadorned prose. No detail presents itself uselessly: once laid down, it reappears elsewhere, building up, like thin layers of slate, a captivating world of wistful ennui. No grousing about Grouse County: this startling, affecting, and funny debut (serialized in the New Yorker) contributes to the American literary tradition of arch renditions of midwestern rural life. Gilbert Taylor
From Kirkus Reviews
Drury's first novel, set in Grouse County, a network of small towns in the Midwest, is a poker-faced look at American folkways in a world that is precarious and perverse. Grouse County does not have cable, and it will never, ancient rumors to the contrary, play host to a farm movie starring Sally Field. On the other hand it does have Big Days, town meetings, and periodic elections for Sheriff. Instead of a plot, Drury provides a panoramic view of the county, a host of minor characters, and three major ones: Tiny Darling, an unconvicted thief; his wife, Louise, and Sheriff Dan Norman. While Tiny is an instantly recognizable lowlife, Drury constructs Dan and Louise almost stealthily, a detail here, a trait there. Early on Louise tires of her seven-year marriage to Tiny and throws him out. In short order, she and Dan are dating, sleeping together, living together, married. Dan is a laid-back sheriff, but he has no experience of domesticity. Bothered by insomnia, he sees a therapist who finds him unreadable, as does Louise, though she continues to love him. The crisis comes when Louise almost dies after her baby is stillborn. The irony (unforced) is that earlier Sheriff Dan had been led to an abandoned baby in a supermarket. The unwanted baby lives; the wanted baby dies. Shattered, Louise retreats to her aunt's house in Minnesota while Dan runs for re-election. A poor politician, he is almost defeated by a rich farmer's son and dirty tricks engineered by Tiny. Louise returns home. Slow fade. There's an awful lot here to like: the dialogue, the sly humor, the feather-light touch, the clean drive of the prose. All Drury needs is a plot for his work to really take off. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Review
"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."
From the Inside Flap
ums the church before stealing the chalice....A lonely woman paints her toenails in a drafty farmhouse....A sleepless man watches his restless bride scatter their bills beneath the stars....Welcome to Grouse County....
"Tom Drury's loving, wryly intelligent take on Grouse County is at once sophisticated and compassionate. Drury's prose is quietly heartbreaking, laugh-out-loud funny, and always, absolutely convincing. The End of Vandalism marks the beginning of a distinguished American career."
--Jayne Anne Phillips
"Remarkable...Every so often a debut novel appears that simply stuns you with the elegance and beauty of its writing....A+"
--Entertainment Weekly
"So amiably dense with anecdote and observation, the reader is bounced along by its energy....Grouse County is unabashedly American, a setting both nostalgic and wittily contemporary....In a sense, the main character is the county itself, with its eccentricities, rituals, quarrels and comfort
From the Back Cover
A thief vacuums the church before stealing the chalice....A lonely woman paints her toenails in a drafty farmhouse....A sleepless man watches his restless bride scatter their bills beneath the stars....Welcome to Grouse County....
"Tom Drury's loving, wryly intelligent take on Grouse County is at once sophisticated and compassionate. Drury's prose is quietly heartbreaking, laugh-out-loud funny, and always, absolutely convincing. The End of Vandalism marks the beginning of a distinguished American career."
--Jayne Anne Phillips
"Remarkable...Every so often a debut novel appears that simply stuns you with the elegance and beauty of its writing....A+"
--Entertainment Weekly
"So amiably dense with anecdote and observation, the reader is bounced along by its energy....Grouse County is unabashedly American, a setting both nostalgic and wittily contemporary....In a sense, the main character is the county itself, with its eccentricities, rituals, quarrels and comforts."
--The Boston Sunday Globe
"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
"Rich and readable...[Drury] possesses his made-up world with the same authority Sherwood Anderson brought to Winesburg, Ohio, and Faulkner to Yoknapatawpha County....The many characters who walk their separate paths end up weaving each other inside a mysterious pattern, in which they themselves are also caught."
--USA Today
Chosen by New York magazine and Publishers Weekly as
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF 1994
About the Author
Tom Drury is the author of several novels, including The End of Vandalism, Hunts in Dreams, The Driftless Area, and The Black Brook. His fiction has appeared in the New Yorker, Harper's, and the Mississippi Review, and he has been named one of Granta's Best Young American Novelists.
Lloyd James (a.k.a. Sean Pratt) has been narrating since 1996 and has recorded over six hundred audiobooks. He is a seven-time winner of the AudioFile Earphones Award and has twice been a finalist for the prestigious Audie Award. His critically acclaimed performances include Elvis in the Morning by William F. Buckley Jr. and Searching for Bobby Fischer by Fred Waitzkin, among others.
