The End of Vandalism by Tom Drury

Hell of a book!

They had the Friday night shrimp at a supper club called the Lifetime. Ruby Jones tended bar there. She was a cousin of the nurse Barbara Jones and known for carding infrequently. She was very popular with underage drinkers.

Yet the Lifetime had a quiet and almost elegant atmosphere. There were not many fights, and even when there were, the tactics were gentlemanly and afterward the participants would say, “What were we fighting about? We weren’t even fighting.” It’s hard to say how places acquire the feeling found within them. Ten years before, Lifetime and Rack-O’s, which is outside Romyla, had been on more or less of an even footing. They were both close enough to Stone City to draw upon its sizable population, but far enough away to be regarded as country paces. So explain how Lifetime became genteel while Rack-O’s deteriorated into a haven for dopers.

There is no answer. It’s just interesting.

The End of Vandalism, Tom Drury

A few weeks ago I couldn’t figure out what to read. It was mightily vexing me. I picked five or six books off my new bookshelf that I bought chief and stuck in my kitchen, even though it matches nothing in the kitchen and is kind of an eyesore, I only bought it because I was tired of stacking books on the floor, and after a few days I was more or less used to it. But I picked up a bunch of books that I’d bought for whatever reason and nothing was hitting, and then I plucked an ugly-covered rust-colored book off the shelf that I didn’t remember buying at all, The End of Vandalism by Tom Drury. Eventually I figured out it had been recommended to me by my friend Bud (and also, it turns out, my friend Will, but that was years ago, and I forgot. Sorry, Will!) though I don’t remember when or why. But he had given it such enthusiastic praise that I must have gone to the bookstore immediately, purchased it, and promptly forgot it existed. So it sat for months on my “haven’t read this yet” pile on the floor, which became the “haven’t read this yet” bright white too big kind of ugly bookshelf in my kitchen, until the exact perfect moment when the planets shifted just right and the evening sun came pouring through the window and out of nowhere this book just lit up and asked me to read it.

And wouldn’t you know it, I haven’t loved a book this much in a very long time.

Like many of my favorite books, the only plot is the big plot—that is, Time. This book moves at the pace of a life. In terms of blatant craft, very few scenes advance the plot. There are events, and things are always slowly moving towards some kind of resolution. And a resolution does come. But that’s not really why we’re here. We’re here because we love Dan, we love Louise, and some part of us even loves Tiny, no matter how bad a husband he was. Each minor character in this book is very much alive, and they exist in a mode realer than the protagonists of eighty percent of the books I’ve read in the past year. The old man that runs the photography studio Louise works at, Mr. Kleeborg? He’s so real he’s a person. It’s wild, the best magic trick, the reason I come to books in the first place.

It's also blessedly, wonderfully funny. And it takes its time, moving so slowly, full of event, but not the sort of even that leads inexorably to the next. No scene requires the following scene. Again, it moves at the pace of life, and the small moments (a conversation about bowling, or the accidental destruction of Dan’s old trailer) are given more weight than a violent assault by tire iron. It refuses to see any of its characters as unimportant, or as anything less than a regular, beautiful, miraculous human. It’s generous spirit is so steeped in an affection for people—individual, strange, wonderful people—that it does its own magic trick on your spirit. It’s the kind of book that reminds you of the inner lives of your neighbors that you never talk to, that the weird guy who wears sweatpants all day and steals plastic bottles out of everyone’s trash and (it turns out) is actually a secret millionaire has just as much a rich and beautiful inner life as you do. Probably more.

Check out this conversation with a zealous Baptists woman, Jane Gower, who is really only around for about fifteen pages total, though you get the feeling she’s interesting enough for her own novel:

On Saturday, Sheriff Dan Norman was kneeling on top of his trailer house, trying to patch a rusty spot that was beginning to leak, when a religious woman came by. She had yellow hair pulled into a thick braid. Her Bible was white, and she held it in both hands, like a big white sandwich.

“Does Jesus live in this home?” she said.

“Pardon?” said Dan. He stood up. In his hands were a trowel and a can of orange sealant, called Mendo, that he had got at Big Bear.

“Did you know that Jesus could live in this trailer?” said the woman. “Because he can. You accept him as your personal savior, he’s here tomorrow.”

“I’m comfortable with my beliefs,” said Dan.

“Well—what are they?” said the woman.

“Let’s just say I have some,” said Dan, “leave it there.”

“Fine with me,” said the woman. She tucked the Bible under her arm and climbed the aluminum ladder leaning against the side of the trailer. She stepped onto the roof and held out her hand.

Again, that’s the miracle of this book. A kid who spraypaints the town water tower has lived in my mind more vividly than the entire cast of the last four books I’ve read, and he was only in it for nine pages. I wish I could have found out what happened with his crush, a foreign exchange student named Chiang, after she’s forced to move away. But you know what, I kind of already do know. She only gets a handful of pages herself, but when she gets up and walks off the page, you get a pretty good feeling she’s just fine and about her own business.

And like Charles Portis, Drury is a master of having people talk past each other, a conversation happening between two people, both of them speaking a kind of heightened mundanity that reveals the deepest parts of themselves, both of them missing each other entirely. It’s enough to break your heart, and it would be too much to bear if it wasn’t also so funny.

“Do you remember when we were in high school?” said Tiny.

“We weren’t in high school at the same time.”

“You weren’t a freshman when I was a senior?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“Well anyway. In my senior interview, they asked, ‘What is your pet peeve?’ And do you know what I said? Do you remember?”

“No,” said Louise. “And please get your arm off the door.”

“People who think they’re better than others.”

“Oh, everybody said that. And better isn’t the issue. You want me to say I was wrong. Fine. I was wrong. I wrote the book of wrong. Now stop following me. You know, we never should have got married. Our marriage was . . . misguided.”

“You liked my owl tattoo.”

“Yeah, there’s a solid foundation.”

“You forget the good times,” said Tiny. “You have dismissed them from your mind.”

“It’s hard to conduct a life and not have a few good times, if only by chance,” said Louise.”

A few good times, if only by chance. There’s this line from St. Irenaeus about the glory of God being the human being fully alive. I’ve always taken that to mean living actually, as in experiencing good and bad times, boring times, thrilling times, sitting around times, wishing you were dead times, ecstatic wild times, all of it. Being fully alive even in the minor things, because that’s most of what life is. Somehow Tom Drury can make a conversation about a mediocre police television drama as important as divorce. And I suppose, to the people in the moment, it just might be.

So yeah. The End of Vandalism. Great book. You should read it.