This fifth novel by Tom Drury boasts a thumbs-up cover line from Jonathan Franzen, who might, you suspect, have given it in baffled gratitude at the disparity between their careers. The author of The Corrections has experienced one way that the life of a gifted American writer can go – bestsellers, National Book award, world tours, stray remarks sparking Twitter-storms – while Drury, 60 next year, has had the other: magazine short stories, small-press publication, literary superstars expressing mystification in interviews and puff quotes that he isn’t as well known as they are.
One reason for this neglect is publishing momentum. Pacific, published in the US two years ago, extends into a trilogy a sequence that began in 1994 with The End of Vandalism and was followed, 15 years ago, by Hunts in Dreams. These long gaps were punctuated by a couple of other books, but it is the three linked works that best make the case for Drury’s closet greatness. They are based in the American midwest, in an unspecified location somewhere around the Dakotas, Minnesota and Illinois, and focus on the fictional community of Grouse County, where the civic fathers thought nothing of calling a town Boris or a thoroughfare Old Woman Springs Road.
Some characters recur across the three books, ageing, procreating and divorcing. At the start of Pacific, Sheriff Dan Norman, whose investigation into vandalism at an anti-vandalism dance kicked off the trilogy, has declined to run for a sixth term as sheriff and become a private detective, while Albert Robeshaw, a child in the first book, is now a reporter on the local paper. A son’s pursuit to Los Angeles of his estranged mother geographically expands the story.
American writing on either side of the second millennium features a recurrent voice of laconic documentary. This register exists on a spectrum from the whimsical – Garrison Keillor, Armistead Maupin, David Sedaris – to the ominous: Don DeLillo, David Lynch, James Ellroy. Drury hovers somewhere in the middle of that range, close to Raymond Carver, especially the Carver of Short Cuts, the tragicomic anthology movie that Robert Altman fashioned from the short stories.
In a similar way, Pacific plaits together multiple plot lines that have a unifying quality of fretful oddness. The star of the TV crime show Forensic Mystic is summoned to a remote cabin by a screenwriter to discuss the ghostly romance that may be her movie break; fresh from a spell in the penitentiary for embezzlement, an ex-con becomes involved in a market for faked relics of Celtic antiquity; an old man in a park, pushing a shopping trolley, stops to demonstrate a dying-out method of muscle-based handwriting; high-school students renounce their cellphones in a sudden revival of luddism.
As the connections between these weirdnesses become clearer, the serious business is Drury’s prose. The style is slyly wry, so that a reference to “a locally famous taxidermist who had his own radio show” has gone past before you start to wonder just how the stuffing of animals would work on the wireless. This is also a writer who can go from laughter to darkness in an instant, as when, after what has seemed to be a tender sex scene, a woman reflects: “This was the best, the most bearable loneliness.”
Writing of this kind is all about leaving things out. Events sufficient for a chapter or even a novel are summarised in eight words: “Tiny explained how he lost the plumbing business.” It is left to the reader to deduce that one relationship in Pacific probably involves statutory rape, while Drury’s application of point of view is so meticulous that when one character overhears another on the phone saying, during a rain storm, “Do you believe this? … they’re only guessing like the rest of us”, we supply the presumed comment at the other end of the line about the unreliability of weather forecasters.
Emblematic of his non-interventionist economy is that Drury never adds to “said” any interpretative adverbs such as “sadly” or “jokingly”, so that readers are left to infer the tone when, for instance, after the departure of a waitress who has addressed customers as “babe” and “angel”, a diner remarks: “She seems awfully fond of us.”
It would be nice if one day actors give us their readings of those lines in the screen version, by a latter-day Altman, that surely lies in Grouse County. Until then, readers are encouraged to close the gap between the sales figures of Drury and Franzen. American literature can appear so crowded that it seems unlikely we could be overlooking giants, but the recently acclaimed short-story writer Edith Pearlman is one and Drury is another.
• Mark Lawson’s The Deaths is published by Picador. To order Pacific for £9.60 (RRP £12) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
