Driftless by David Rhodes

It was impossible to explain how in those days, in earlier times, in the past, there really were giants--people who did good things, odd things, that others would never do. Those giants were at the heart of everything. Nothing could have been the way it was without them, but how could anyone explain them after they were gone?

Last weekend I got to drive through southwest Wisconsin, part of a larger zone known as the "Driftless Area" because, unlike the surrounding Midwest, it was free of the glaciers that flattened the land and left deposits of transported the earth. It's a rolling country, filled with green hills separated by narrow valleys of golden farmland, like pockets. It's easy to understand how a town might settle in one of these pockets and become separated from the rest of the world. In David Rhodes' Driftless, that town is Words, Wisconsin, a hamlet of a few dozen farms and families. In Words there are no restaurants and no stores--though these things can be found in a nearby town called Grange--but there are farms and houses, dogs and cats and cows, a church, an anti-government militia, and a single panther on the prowl.

Driftless is what one might call "a yarn." It describes the intersecting lives of several of the people of Words, including: an old farmer named July, a married couple who are being persecuted by their milk cooperative for discovering the embezzlement of their corporate leaders, a puritanical young female priest whose life is upended by a vision, a sad-sack repairman who can't get over his wife's death, a musician who dreams of being noticed by her rock-and-roll idol, a beautiful, devout, wheelchair-bound woman cared for by her older sister, and a bunch of Amish. The threads of their lives are mostly made up of small-town stuff, blown up to comic and extravagant levels, like the saga of the perfidious milk collective. A character named Rusty learns to overcome his suspicion of the Amish when he hires them to work on his house. A tough parolee named Wade saves the wheelchair-bound Olivia from hoodlums, and they fall in love. (This last storyline has a particular resonance when one finds out that Rhodes published several successful novels in the 1970's before being paralyzed from the waist down in a motorcycle accident, this being his first novel in the thirty subsequent years.)

Those stories grabbed me, brought me in. They made the novel quick and thrilling, and rode roughshod over the novel's many flaws: a tendency to have characters say and believe stupid things, for instance, though never quite stupid enough to make them satirical. Or the sinking feeling that you're supposed to find someone like Winifred, the pastor, quirkily rigid instead of largely insufferable. Or the sense that the novel has been so delicately planned it is like a piece of architecture, even as many of its details get lost somewhere in the blueprints. (I would have liked more of the Amish, who disappear halfway through the book. And would it be too much to get a resolution to the story about the milk collective?) The novel, too, can be mawkish about rural life, but ultimately it has a winning and delicate spirit that makes it worth reading. It seemed, to my eyes at least, to do a good job of bringing this largely unnoticed corner of the American landscape to vivid life.