The dueling reviewers here are Watermark owners Bruce Jacobs and Sarah Bagby.

In his new fourth novel Drury has created a "graphic" novel but without illustrations, panels, or dialogue balloons; I couldn’t get the "cult" animated movie Waking Life out of my mind as I followed Drury’s tale. Now, I know nothing about graphic novels except what my colleague Mark Bradshaw has taught me, but I can visualize the short, often witty, often ironic dialogue ballooning out of characters mouths as they banter about in the small-town Midwest.

Pierre Hunter is a 24-year-old recently orphaned, bemused, existential sort of hero who works the stick at the Jack of Diamonds nurturing drunks and joining them now and then. One night he winds up at a boring party, meets an amorphous stranger when he ventures outside to sober up, and then wanders back to a different party where he performs a coin trick and is arrested for trespassing and being drunk and disorderly. So begins a saga that somehow leads him hitchhiking to California and back where he gets entangled with a bad guy with $77,000 in a brown paper bag which Pierre steals; or as he says: "When you take money someone stole, while he is also trying to steal from you. What is that?"

Way leads on to way, and Hunter meets a mysterious woman living alone in the country, falls for her, gives away the money he took, is found by the bad guy, gets killed in a shoot out in a local orchard, and is sort of resurrected. Mysteries abound, but Pierre, as if a melancholic character out of Beckett, keeps rolling along observing life: "You write your poems, the leaves move, you get laid sometimes. Isn’t that

fun?"

It's hard to know what to make of this short novel except to take it as it is, enjoy it, and maybe learn a little something about keeping on in a world of serendipity.

Review by Bruce Jacobs, August 10, 2006

-

This short novel is spare in detail but rich in definition. Dark, funny, existential, and deeply Midwestern, it’s set in a small town known for its annual celebration and re-enactment of a famous foiled bank heist. Entangled in a "neo-noir" caper, our unlikely hero finds himself holding the bag – the bag of stolen cash, that is, and he’s unable to pass that hot potato on to anyone else. Thus arises a modern fable filled with odd, hilarious introspection played out among a crowd of eccentric characters and broad, easy spaces that offer endless room for calamity.

If the trick of writing fiction is knowing what to cut without compromising a story’s integrity, then Tom Drury has it down. His knife-sharp pen slices to the paradoxical core of us, the place where we see that the things that save us also leave us vulnerable, because in the long run we’re going to lose them.

Mystery readers and book groups will feast on this novel and relish picking at its bones. Other hungry Midwestern readers need to get the book and read it so that I have someone to discuss it with; after The Driftless Area, I am just starving to talk.

Review by Sarah Bagby, August 10, 2006