May 14, 2000
American Gothic
Tom Drury's Midwestern characters have too many troubles and too little hope.

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  • First Chapter: 'Hunts in Dreams'
    By D. T. MAX

    By Tom Drury.
    200 pp. Boston:
    Houghton Mifflin Company. $22.

    Do depressed people gravitate to depressed towns or is it the towns that depress them? That's one of the questions Tom Drury's ''Hunts in Dreams'' prompts. ''Hunts in Dreams'' is the modest sequel to Drury's excellent first novel, ''The End of Vandalism,'' which introduced the economically adrift Midwest farming community of Grouse County. It's a somber, American Gothic-type story, about the lives of four limited people over four October days, told in four parts. The sentences are short, dropping into silence. The narrative technique discourages optimism. You know intuitively that in Grouse County hope rarely pans out.

    At the center of ''Hunts in Dreams'' is the Darling family: Charles, Joan and their children, Lyris and Micah. In ''The End of Vandalism,'' Charles, then known as Tiny, was the town problem. He stole. He vandalized a high school dance put together to protest vandalism. He harassed an ex-wife. If there was a fight in a bar, he was there. Joan was a Bible-verse-quoting wanderer he hooked up with on a piano bench after a substance abuse session.

    Unpromising beginnings, but as ''Hunts in Dreams'' opens, they've made a life together. They're married. Their 7-year-old son, Micah, is learning to ride a bicycle. More recently, Home Bringers, an organization that returns adopted children to their birth parents, contacted them about a girl named Lyris. It turns out that when Joan was an actress playing a pregnant woman in a play called ''Au Contraire, Pierre'' in Chicago -- an event referred to in the first book -- she was, in fact, pregnant. That baby is now 16-year-old Lyris. They send her to the local high school. The family, makeshift as it is, is complete. Charles is a plumber, a productive member of society, but his reformed behavior, his decision ''to put childish things aside,'' comes less from maturity than from ironic distance. The front of his truck says ''Here Comes Charles the Plumber.'' The back says ''There Goes Charles the Plumber.'' His inner life is a knot of negativity. At one point, he looks at Lyris and mulls over the damage he might do to this ''willowy and high-browed . . . princess.'' He decides to leave her alone, not because lusting after her would be wrong, but because it would be a cliche. ''He regarded himself as an innovator with no tolerance for the obvious sins,'' the narrator notes. He decides to buy her a goat for a 4-H competition instead.

    As he is unpredictable, so Charles is unable to predict. He can't figure out what Joan thinks or feels about him. She is the more successful of the two, now the executive director of a league of animal shelters. She is about to go off to the league's convention, where she will argue against keeping pets waiting for adoption in cages. Before she leaves for her trip, she and Charles have a fight. She complains he is being too possessive, objecting to ''this feeling you have of, of, of ownership.'' But the parallel (she doesn't want to be caged either) eludes him.

    At the convention, Joan has an affair with a doctor, who has pursued her to her hotel from Grouse County. It is he who recites the lines from Tennyson's ''Locksley Hall,'' addressed by a former lover to a woman who has made an unhappy marriage: ''Like a dog, he hunts in dreams, and thou art staring at the wall, / Where the dying night-lamp flickers, and the shadows rise and fall.'' Joan's loyal response is that Charles is not like a dog, but she's wrong. He is. She calls to say she will not be coming home. He sulks. Micah hopes Home Bringers will intervene. They brought him a sister. Now they can bring him back his mother.

    But the pilgrim won't be deterred from her quest. That this is the year 2000 weighs on her. Joan travels to a town damaged by a tornado searching for an epiphany. Everyone else is left to muddle through, going back to ''the true business of parents acting erratically and children responding as best they knew how.'' Charles tries to recover a shotgun his stepfather once owned from a widow, imagining that it will reconnect him to an earlier time. Lyris is carried off by a local stalker and freed by a group of hunters seeking an invisible fox (these are two of the many futile hunts in the book).

    In ''The End of Vandalism,'' Drury showed a flexible new voice. He put several sets of couples in motion and knocked them into one another. One left the book with a sense of humanity and the idiosyncrasies of love. ''Hunts in Dreams'' is a more limited effort. Its canvas is smaller. It is often obvious: When Joan is adrift, she swims in a pool. When Charles is worried, he shores up his barn's foundations. The narrative scheme undercuts any hope of redemption the characters have. Every time someone picks up a gun, you expect him to use it on himself.

    At times Drury seems to have trouble finding his voice. After so expertly balancing humor and hard knocks in ''The End of Vandalism,'' here he adopts a minimalist's bleak sentimentality. Consider this conversation between a bartender and Joan in her hotel bar:

    '' 'Hmm,' he said. . . . 'You're asking what I want or what I think they want?'

    '' 'What you want.'

    '' 'Now that's a question. I'd have to consider it.'

    '' 'That's what I want.'

    ''A waitress came up with a pencil behind her ear. 'Candy, what do people want?' said the bartender.

    '' 'A little loving, I suppose,' she said.''

    Don't dismiss ''Hunts in Dreams,'' though. If you read the book on its own, it feels hard to care about this affectless family. But when linked with the stronger ''End of Vandalism,'' the book has more charm. It gives off a sense of passing time, of that particular pleasure of a multipart novel, the roman-fleuve. What happened in the eight years between ''The End of Vandalism'' and ''Hunts in Dreams''? What happens next? By book's end, it is clear that we will find out. Charles, Micah and Lyris go out and look at the aurora borealis. The lights shimmer and disappear. On the porch the goat rests peacefully, ''ears back, a placid silver form.'' Micah will continue to practice his bike riding, Charles reminding him that learning isn't so bad, ''it's falling that hurts.''

    D. T. Max is a contributing editor for The Paris Review.

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