Driftless by David Rhodes

Our book club book for this month was Driftless by David Rhodes.

Set in a fictional town in rural Wisconsin (what is commonly known as the "Driftless" region of Wisconsin), this comeback novel by David Rhodes details the ways in which community is built in rural America. Rhodes was apparently quite the sensation in the 1970s, when he released several critically regarded novels, but then he was involved in a motorcycle accident that left him paralyzed. It wasn't until 2008 that this novel was released.

I thought it was kind of lazy, if I'm going to be honest. There was not a lot of plot in this book; it was much more character driven. Since there was so little plot, the fact that there are giant gaping plot holes is problematic. We have a character who has been in a wheelchair most of her adult life and it turns out that she's been misdiagnosed and some antibiotics can fix her (!). Even in rural Wisconsin, doctors aren't that incompetent and it only took her a single trip to Madison to fix the situation. There are no black mountain lions in Wisconsin. The characters who swoop in to save the day at the end are a couple of lawyers we don't meet until the last twenty pages. I mean, we were introduced to dozens of characters throughout this novel, so why couldn't they have been slipped in, at least a brief mention, at some point before the very end.

Rhodes' writing style was fine. I thought it occasionally lapsed into too many words for my liking, but most of the time it was interesting and just descriptive enough. 

There were mixed reactions in our book club. Some folks really loved the descriptions. Because we live in Wisconsin, we tend to think it's the best place to be and reading fiction that elevates our geography and our sense of community. Some of us thought it was a bit too writerly in the sense that Rhodes thinks a bit highly of himself. We were unanimously confused about the role of religion in the book, but since only one of the people at book club regularly attends church, we assumed this was more about us than about the writing. I was not the only one to note the plot points (the veterinarian in our group actually thought it was supposed to be magical realism because of the oddness in the plot), but I think I was the only one to roundly dismiss the book because of how lazy I thought it was.

All of that aside, I might go and get one of those novels from the 1970s to see what his writing was like before the accident. This book definitely intrigued me, even if I didn't love this it.