Driftless

It’s a joke told by nearly every author (or, more likely, the author’s family): He or she is at work on the Great American Novel. One would guess that—with the publication of his first novel in 30 years—Rhodes’s family isn’t laughing.

The novelist graduated from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1971 and published The Last Fair Deal Going Down, his debut novel, in 1972. His second novel, The Easter House, earned comparisons to classics like Winesburg, Ohio. Rock Island Line followed, and no less than critical darling John Gardner praised Rhodes’s work in his book, On Becoming a Novelist. But Rhodes suffered a motorcycle accident in 1976, leaving him paralyzed from the waist down. Driftless is his first book in 33 years.

At the center of this lengthy meditation on rural America is drifter-turned-farmer July Montgomery (the protagonist in Rock Island Line), an iconic loner who serves as catalyst for the rest of the book’s characters. He introduces a budding musician to her idol, nudges the broken widower back into the game, shares an epiphany with the local minister. Eventually, the big themes emerge. A cougar, menacing from the fringe, begins to encroach farther and farther into civilization. Milk farmers who discover corruption in the system find themselves ground beneath bureaucracy’s wheel. The cantankerous old hand opens his life and home to the strange asceticism of his Amish neighbors.

It’s clear that Rhodes took his time with this one, winner of Milkweed’s national fiction prize. Rhodes wields a microscope throughout the story, letting no detail go uncataloged. And for the most part, we’re thankful for this; it lends a richness, depth and beauty to the writing, even when it feels like an obstacle to the story’s pacing. But few books have the power to transport the way Driftless does, and it’s Rhodes’s eye for detail that we have to thank for it.

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