The Driftless Area
by Tom Drury
Atlantic Monthly Press, 213 pp., $22
The title of Tom Drury’s The Driftless Area refers to a region of the Midwest surrounded by glaciated territory, a surviving example of what the world might have looked like some 10,000 years ago. A place where the ice age meets the modern world is an apt setting for Drury’s story, one that toys with the idea that “time doesn’t exist. And everything that ever happened or ever will was here from the start.” The quote is protagonist Pierre Hunter’s own description of a book he’s reading, a book he claims not to understand entirely. It’s also a pretty good summary of Driftless‘ central conceit: You can’t prevent a future that’s already happened, or, more precisely, one that’s already happening.
Pierre is a 24-year-old who’s moved back to his hometown after college. His family is gone, and he seems to have no particular reason to return. Though he’s seemingly directionless, his fate is cast, and he will play an essential role in a chain of events that will irreparably alter his own life and the lives of three strangers. That these events are predestined is a given, and most are foretold by the book’s midpoint, but Drury still manages to make them surprising. This is no simple meditation on fate or the interconnectedness of all things, though: There’s some serious weirdness going on here, but it isn’t of an overpowering sort. Despite its supernatural elements, Driftless achieves a certain realness. Though some aspects of the book are remarkably strange, his characters are not, no matter how strange their lives have been. Drury’s prose is plainwoven and terse. He doesn’t waste a word, and his stark language befits the novel’s desolate geography.
There are several missteps here, but none detract heavily from the story. The majority of the book could occur any time in the past several decades, but a few oddly chosen pop cultural references jar the reader into the present. And, as it’s a novel about inescapable fate, some square pegs fit a bit too neatly into round holes. It’s a slim book with big ideas, but for the most part, Drury lets his readers make connections for themselves. It can be read in several hours and thought about for days, as intricate as it is simply put.
This article appears in 25th Anniversary.