Infidelity, missing persons, drugs, mental health conditions, and murder: these are just a few of the hallmarks of small-town, rural America. That's what one might conclude, at any rate, based on works such as David Lynch's cinema classic Blue Velvet and West of Loveland, the fourth installment in the series of Grouse County novels by Tom Drury (The Driftless Area; Pacific). In its quiet way, Drury's story exposes tensions in a Midwestern community where anonymity is impossible, secrets are common knowledge, and resentments are barely concealed beneath the diaphanous surface of neighborliness.
It all starts with a gun. Rocky is 15. His parents abandoned him, leaving his aunt Helen as his guardian. The locals consider Rocky odd, in part because of his "runaway parents and a lisp." As the novel opens, Rocky and Helen are driving home when Helen spots a revolver by the side of the road. She brings it home "so that [they] can dispose of it in a way that nobody gets hurt."
Readers can find out for themselves whether, in true Chekhovian fashion, the gun introduced at the start of the novel eventually goes off. But the gun's discovery is only the first of many incidents involving the narrative's enormous cast, among them the town sheriff; his wife, an amateur photographer who has an affair with a club owner; and a lounge hostess who did television ads long ago and one day disappeared. To Drury's credit, West of Loveland is not bucolic but rather a perceptive, unsentimental portrait of middle American life. That's the hallmark of an empathetic writer with a lot to say. --Michael Magras, freelance book reviewer