Synopses & Reviews
Review
Accolades for Driftless:Outstanding Achievement Award, Wisconsin Library Associations Literary Award Committee
California Literary Review Best Book
Booklist starred review and Editors Choice
University of Wisconsin-Whitewater Chancellors Regional Literary Award
All Iowa Reads selection, State Library of Iowas Center for the Book
Midwestern Independent Booksellers Association (MIBA) Honor Award
Christian Science Monitor top ten books of the year
Now, after what had to have been years of effort beyond the usual struggle of trying to make a good novel, we get [Rhodess] fourth, and, I have to shout it out, finest book yet. Driftless is the best work of fiction to come out of the Midwest in many years.”
Chicago Tribune
A profound and enduring paean to rural America. Radiant in its prose and deep in its quiet understanding of human needs.”
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Driftless is a fast-moving story about small town life with characters that seem to have walked off the pages of Edgar Lee Masterss Spoon River Anthology.”
Wall Street Journal
Comprised of a large number of short chapters, the novel opens with a prologue reminiscent of Steinbecks beautiful tribute to the Salinas Valley in the opening of East of Eden, with a little touch of Micheners prologue to his novel Hawaii. The book moves at a stately pace as it offers deep philosophy and meditative asides about life in Words, Wisconsin, in the Driftless zone, which is to say, about life on earth.”
NPR, All Things Considered”
Few books have the power to transport the way Driftless does, and its Rhodes eye for detail that we have to thank for it.”
Time Out Chicago
A wry and generous book. Driftless shares a rhythm with the farming community it documents, and its reflective pace is well-suited to characters who are far more comfortable with hard work than words.”
Christian Science Monitor, Best Novels of 2008
A symphonic paean to the stillness that can be found in certain areas of the Midwest, The writing in Driftless is beautiful and surprising throughout, [and] its this poetic pointillism that originally made Rhodes famous.”
Minneapolis Star Tribune
[Driftless] presents a series of portraits that resemble Edgar Lee Masterss 'Spoon River Anthology' in their vividness and in the cumulative picture they create of village life. Each of these stories glimmers.”
New Yorker
Rhodes consciously avoids drama to deliver a portrait of a real rural America as singular, beautiful and foreign as anywhere else.”
Philadelphia City Paper
Rhodes shows he still knows how to keep readers riveted. As affecting as it is pleasantly overstuffed.”
Publishers Weekly
Encompassing and incisive, comedic and profound, Driftless is a radiant novel of community and courage.”
Booklist, 2008 Editors Choice, starred review
Though Driftless is a deeply contemporary talewhat it has to say about the way corporations treat small farmers is, for example, quite pressingit also has the architectural complexity of the great 19th-century novels, but without the gimcrackery too often required to hold their stories together. It partakes as much of the moral universe of Magnolia as of Middlemarch. And it earns comparison to both.”
Books and Culture
Unique, funny, absorbing, at times frightening. A novel crafted by a real writer.”
California Literary Review, Best Books of 2008
Synopsis
Rhodes's long-awaited new novel turns an unblinking eye on an array of eccentric characters and situations. The setting is Words, Wisconsin, an anonymous town of only a few hundred people, but under its sleepy surface, life rages.
Synopsis
"A fast-moving story about small town life with characters that seem to have walked off the pages of Edgar Lee Masters's Spoon River Anthology."--The Wall Street Journal
The few hundred souls who inhabit Words, Wisconsin, are an extraordinary cast of characters. The middle-aged couple who zealously guards their farm from a scheming milk cooperative. The lifelong invalid, crippled by conflicting emotions about her sister. A cantankerous retiree, haunted by childhood memories after discovering a cougar in his haymow. The former drifter who forever alters the ties that bind a community. In his first novel in 30 years, David Rhodes offers a vivid and unforgettable look at life in small-town America.
" Rhodes's] finest work yet . . . Driftless is the best work of fiction to come out of the Midwest in many years."--Chicago Tribune
"Set in a rural Wisconsin town, the book presents a series of portraits that resemble Edgar Lee Masters's 'Spoon River Anthology' in their vividness and in the cumulative picture they create of village life."--The New Yorker
"Encompassing and incisive, comedic and profound, Driftless is a radiant novel of community and courage."--Booklist (starred review)
"A welcome antidote to overheated urban fiction . . . A quiet novel of depth and simplicity."--Kirkus Reviews
"It takes a while for all these stories to kick in, but once they do, Rhodes shows he still knows how to keep readers riveted. Add a blizzard, a marauding cougar and some rabble-rousing militiamen, and the result is a novel that is as affecting as it is pleasantly overstuffed."--Publishers Weekly
Synopsis
The few hundred souls who inhabit Words, Wisconsin, are an extraordinary cast of characters. The middle-aged couple who zealously guards their farm from a scheming milk cooperative. The lifelong invalid, crippled by conflicting emotions about her sister. A cantankerous retiree, haunted by childhood memories after discovering a cougar in his haymow. The former drifter who forever alters the ties that bind a community. In his first novel in 30 years, David Rhodes offers a vivid and unforgettable look at life in small-town America.
Synopsis
When David Rhodes's first three novels were published in the mid-seventies, he was acclaimed as "one of the best eyes in recent fiction" (John Gardner), and compared favorably to Sherwood Anderson. In 1976, a motorcycle accident left him paralyzed from the chest down, and unpublished for the subsequent three decades.
Driftless heralds a triumphant return to the Midwestern landscape Rhodes knows so well, offering a fascinating and entirely unsentimental portrait of a town apparently left behind by the march of time. At once intimate and funny, wise and generous, Driftless is an unforgettable story of contemporary life in rural America.
The few hundred souls who inhabit Words, Wisconsin, are an extraordinary cast of characters. The middle-aged couple who zealously guards their farm from a scheming milk cooperative. The lifelong invalid, crippled by conflicting emotions about her sister. A cantankerous retiree, haunted by childhood memories after discovering a cougar in his haymow. The former drifter who forever alters the ties that bind a community. In his first novel in 30 years, David Rhodes offers a vivid and unforgettable look at how each life affects many.
About the Author
David Rhodes grew up near Des Moines and graduated from Marlboro College in Vermont. After receiving an MFA in Writing from the University of Iowa Writers Workshop in 1971, he published three novels in rapid succession to acclaim: The Last Fair Deal Going Down, The Easter House, and Rock Island Line. Thirty years later, Milkweed reissued these and published his newest novel, Driftless . He currently lives with his wife Edna in Wisconsin, and his next book, Jewelweed will be published in May 2013.
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
Prologue
Chapter One, Thistlewaite County, 1977
Chapter Two, Violet and Olivia, 1997
Chapter Three Cora and Graham
Chapter Four Gail
Chapter Five Grief
Chapter Six Faith Keeps No Treasure
Chapter Seven Humped Floors
Chapter Eight Hot Milk
Chapter Nine Broken Things
Chapter Ten Hiring Help
Chapter Eleven A Gray Van
Chapter Twelve Epiphany
Chapter Thirteen Straight Flush
Chapter Fourteen Fire in the Field
Chapter Fifteen Snow
Chapter Sixteen Envy
Chapter Seventeen A New Song
Chapter Eighteen Remembered Love and Anger
Chapter Nineteen Fear
Chapter Twenty Reunion
Chapter Twenty-One The Meaning of Truth
Chapter Twenty-Two Fighting Dogs
Chapter Twenty-Three The Universal Acorn
Chapter Twenty-Four Insurgency
Chapter Twenty-Five New Love
Chapter Twenty-Six Spring
Chapter Twenty-Seven The Thief
Chapter Twenty-Eight Mushrooms
Chapter Twenty-Nine Breaking In
Chapter Thirty The River
Chapter Thirty-One Family
Chapter Thirty-Two Lawyers
Chapter Thirty-Three The County Fair
Chapter Thirty-Four Meeting at Snow Corners
Chapter Thirty-Five The Look of Death
Chapter Thirty-Six Finding July
Chapter Thirty-Seven Selling Land
Chapter Thirty-Eight Inside the Church
Chapter Thirty-Nine The Funeral
Chapter Forty Driftless