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The End of Vandalism

A Novel

ebook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available
Set in rural Iowa, this “breathtaking . . . remarkable achievement” of a debut novel by the author of Pacific is “at once funny, sad, and touching” (New York Newsday).
 
A New York Magazine and Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year
 
With extensive excerpts appearing in the New Yorker before its release, Tom Drury’s groundbreaking debut, The End of Vandalism, drew widespread acclaim and comparison to the works of Sherwood Anderson and William Faulkner.
 
With his fictional Grouse County, Tom Drury conjures a Midwest that is at once familiar and amusingly eccentric—where a thief vacuums the church before stealing the chalice, a lonely woman paints her toenails in a drafty farmhouse, and a sleepless man watches his restless bride scatter their bills beneath the stars.
 
When Sheriff Dan Norman arrests Tiny Darling for vandalizing an anti–vandalism dance, he goes on to marry the culprit’s ex-wife Louise. But while Tiny loses Louise, Louise loses her sense of self—and all three find themselves in a love triangle that sets them on an epic journey.
 
“A truly great writer.” —Esquire
 
“Grouse County is unabashedly American, a setting both nostalgic and wittily contemporary.” —The Boston Globe
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    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from February 28, 1994
      The late Seymour Lawrence was celebrated for his discerning eye: Drury will figure among his literary legacies. Readers who encountered the 11 chapters of his first novel in the New Yorker can testify to the staying power of Drury's characters, generally lonely, well-meaning Midwesterners who live in the richly realized fictional terrain of Grouse County. In these small farming communities, where families have been intertwined for generations and no event can escape the shadow of the past and the petty gossip of the present, everyone knows everyone else, perhaps better than they should. A lovers' triangle is inevitable when petty thief Tiny Darling can't reconcile himself to his divorce from Louise; she, meanwhile, has drifted into an uneasy marriage with sheriff Dan Norman; and good-hearted, conscientious Dan now adds insomnia to the problems that plague him. Tiny is a comic and poignant antihero. Pugnacious and impulsive, but also confused and vulnerable, he is his own worst enemy, especially when he drinks. Tiny steals instinctively, because it seems logical to him: ``Stealing is like being a chef . . . You can find work anywhere.'' Louise is muddled and unfocused until she becomes pregnant; Dan's quiet compassion can get in the way of his job. Drury has a bemused fondness for his characters' foibles and self-destructive impulses. In distinctive and dryly humorous dialogue, he captures the oblique, random chitchat of basically inarticulate people, who converse in a blend of ungrammatical vernacular and old-fashioned formality. His view of rural life is unsentimental: ``Family agriculture seemed to be over and had not been replaced by any other compelling idea.'' And his sense of place and his eye for the particular in the mundane are extraordinary. This is a quiet book that grows in emotional resonance.

    • Publisher's Weekly

      July 3, 1995
      Set in a small Midwestern town, Drury's first novel centers on a man who has yet to accept his divorce, his ex-wife and her present husband in this novel about the complexities of relationships and the simplicity of rural America.

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  • English

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