West of Loveland

Quotes

“Drury’s world is so far from where we are that it seems to glow across the sky at intervals like a lunar heartbeat. Yet West of Loveland, a new and most welcome Grouse County novel, is also a strangely familiar ‘return to the state of loss we thought to remedy. ‘This place is dying for voices’ he tells us, and Tom Drury’s voice is like no one else’s. It was Chekov who insisted that a gun appearing in the first act must go off by the third, and it might occur to readers that Drury is a version of a future-tense, midwestern Chekov who nevertheless insists that all good, bright lives are shot through with a saving depth of darkness."

“Tom Drury is a national treasure, and this is a masterpiece. No other writer has his eye for detail, his ear for dialogue, his tenderness, his humor, his attunement to the numinous and to community, his calm mesmerizing command of the cadences of plain description. ‘West of Loveland’ refers, in the novel, to the siren song of a secondhand postcard: inscribed with someone else’s memories, someone else’s story, the place beckons to various characters—‘We have to go’—because the fiction of it feels realer than their real lives. Every page of this book is as deep a dream as that postcard. West of Loveland, put simply, is west of Loveland: to read Tom Drury is to have to go to Grouse County."

“I envy the readers who will be reading a Drury novel for the first time, and I rejoice with other readers who, like me, are long-time admirers of his work. With a wry humor, an insatiable thirst for storytelling, and a keen recognition of the beautiful strangeness in everyday life, Drury has delivered in West of Loveland a memorable novel that will make the world a less lonely and more mysterious place."

“Tom Drury makes beautiful novels. West of Loveland is funny and heartbreaking, expansive and focused, episodic and cumulative, gorgeous and understated. The novel is profoundly American in its rhythms, its setting and its characters."