From the beginning, Drury's hero does not have luck on his side. A girlfriend breaks up with him, his parents pass away, he gets arrested, he breaks through thin ice while skating. When something good finally does happen—he falls in love with the woman who pulls him out of the freezing water—he ultimately becomes the victim of her revenge.
Drury covers a lot of territory in the book. Much of it, as the summary suggests, surrounds a heist of $77,000 and a subsequent cat-and-mouse game, but Drury has grander plans than to tell an action story. The book also explores destiny and the afterlife. There's romance and mystery, irony and the supernatural. Drury neatly and effortlessly packs this all into a slim 213 pages.
Drury's characters are unusual but believable, and not at all wholesome Midwesterners. Hunter is complex and darkly humorous. He endures hardships with unwavering stability, and goes about life with a solemn coolness. The friends, acquaintances and enemies that float in and out of his life are just as intriguing.
Hunter's closest friends are a young married couple who have both had affairs; a girl he meets on a hitchhiking trip tries to persuade him to break into her own home; and his girlfriend and rescuer is a mysterious recluse of a woman who lives on top of an isolated hill and is rumored to have changed dramatically after suffering an accident.
The dialogue between the characters is simple yet impactful, and Drury's prose is the same: deliberate and minimalist. He covers so much in so few pages, and yet you never get the feeling that you've been cheated on details. He has the ability to write an action-packed sequence and then go on to capture the ordinary tasks of everyday life and continue to hold your attention.
The pace of Drury's storytelling is quick. He moves things forward in a way that complements the book's theme of destiny. His style creates a vivid but dreamy picture for the reader. There's a trance-like affect that fits beautifully with the story as it flows between worlds and evokes mystery.
Humor plays a large if subtle role in The Driftless Area. In the opening chapter, a friend of Hunter's girlfriend comes to his house to deliver the message that he has been dumped:
"Listen, Rebecca's breaking up with you," said Carrie. "She wanted you to be the first to know."
"Oh, good," said Pierre.
"Sorry."
"But you knew before I did."
"Well, you're among the first."
The story is set in an area of the Midwest literally called the "Driftless Area," a place where four states meet and share unusual geology, a result of being spared from glacial activity that affected the rest of the region. The setting creates the perfect backdrop, as it plays into the otherworldly nature of the book and draws a parallel between the physical area and the space between reality and the spiritual the book moves between.
At times you wonder where the story is going, but it all makes sense in the end. Well, sort of. The story ties up loose ends and there's an "Aha!" moment, but generally the story raises more questions than it answers. It explores the role of fate in life and wonders if once events are set in motion, can they be stopped.
Hunter figures out his path, or at least reaches an understanding that he's on one that has been predetermined for him, toward the end of the book: "Even though the answer is in the future. And how could that be? Because the future has already happened."
While the questions raised in The Driftless Area may not be entirely original, the story and the way it is told is extraordinary and cements Tom Drury as an intriguing and imaginative novelist.