The Black Brook

by Tom Drury

"It was a dry, dusty summer day in New Hampshire. Paul and Mary Emmons were having lunch in a diner called Happy's when Mary happened to notice a dog in a car in the parking lot with his head turned upside down." Thus begins the strange and captivating saga of Paul Nash, a.k.a. Paul Emmons, a fallen accountant whose inadvisable return to New England, the region of his crimes, sets the stage for this darkly comic novel of love, death, guilt, redemption, and the various forms of clam chowder. More than a dog's head gets turned upside down in the course of Paul's transatlantic misadventures. Through it all Paul strives to find and accomplish his mission in life, and myriad characters contrive to tell their stories -- of unkept promises, nightmarish evenings, identities lost and found.

Genres: Fiction, Novels

319 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1998

About the author

Tom Drury was born in 1956. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, Drury has published short fiction and essays in The New Yorker, A Public Space, Ploughshares, Granta, The Mississippi Review, The New York Times Magazine, and Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. His novels have been translated into German, Spanish, and French. "Path Lights," a story Drury published in The New Yorker, was made into a short film starring John Hawkes and Robin Weigert and directed by Zachary Sluser. The film debuted on David Lynch Foundation Television and played in film festivals around the world. In addition to Iowa, Drury has lived in Massachusetts, Connecticut, Florida, and California. He currently lives in Brooklyn and is published by Grove Press.

Reviews

[Ian Scuffling · Rating 2 out of 5]

Tom Drury’s The Black Brook is the story of Paul Nash aka Paul Eammons, a man in the Witness Protection Program after working with the Feds to bust a mob group he was working for. Paul doesn’t really seem to care too much about fulfilling the terms of the protection and makes frequent visits back to his hometown—the last place he should be.

Drury’s prose is very tight and clean, almost Hemingwayan but kind of lacking the emotional depth that Papa was able to build through dense layers of terseness. Instead, Drury’s style hangs its hat on the hope its matter-of-factness will create laughter. I found this to be rarely the case.

It’s an odd thing where this book has all kinds of fun elements loaded with the potential for a really enjoyable time: ghosts, art forgery, a mob boss with a missing hand nicknamed “the Pliers,” strange affairs. But honestly, it doesn’t amount to much. Paul is fearless throughout the novel, whether he’s in the face of the mob that is threatening to kill him, or interacting with a spectral form in the house he’s renting, Paul is unaffected and unreactive. Because there’s no sense of urgency or danger for Paul, the locus of the urgency and danger in the plot, there’s not really make to stake your reading on. For all of its fun elements, it amounts to a pretty boring affair.

I’ve not read anything else by Drury, but the book feels pretty situated in the shitty aesthetics of the “literary short story writer” style that was prominent in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s where irony and postmodernism were eschewed for “raw” “realness” and maybe too steady of a diet of Raymond Carver. Unfortunately, The Black Brook is flat and flavorless, feeling formally like the early styles of “MFA fiction” that would come to blossom later in the ‘00s and ‘10s. I had higher hopes going into this one as a few people whose tastes I trust led me to it, but unfortunately I leave the book wondering what was even the point of reading it.

[Dan · Rating 2 out of 5]

I first heard about this book while reading a review of Tom Drury's new novel "Pacific" by Daniel Handler in the New York Times. Handler was ebullient about "Pacific" but also made specific mention of "The Black Brook" as one of his personal favorites. So I went in predisposed to liking the book, and the premise was certainly intriguing. A Rhode Island accountant, Paul Nash, testifies against the local mob boss he's been helping to launder money, then he goes into witness protection, living under the assumed name of Paul Emmons in Spokane. Paul never seems particularly conflicted about his criminal past or the fact that some mobsters want him dead. In fact, he and his wife soon grow bored of Spokane and move back home, where they make no efforts to conceal themselves. Paul's lack of concern about the bad guys he's betrayed keeps the reader from viewing them as a legitimate threat. In fact, Paul's nihilism eventually comes to seem all-encompassing. He shrugs off his illegalities: joyriding in a stolen car, selling forged artwork, buying stolen social security numbers to obtain credit cards he then uses to travel back and forth between Europe and the United States. When the bad guys eventually catch up with Paul, he engages them in small talk. He abandons his wife once he finds out she's pregnant and starts up an affair with the wife of an old friend. These plot points are offered up in the same offhand manner as the bric-a-brac of random details surrounding and overwhelming them, so it's impossible to become invested in Paul's fate. And there is a sea of random detail, such that by page 100 you feel as though you're wading through waist-deep water. There are visits to sites of minor historical significance. Bit players come and go. A ghost quotes household hints. Usually in a novel the accretion of details leads to some overarching theme--the sum is greater than the parts--but with "The Black Brook" the point seems to be that there is no point. Sure, it's true that life can seem random, but that's kind of why we turn to books--to escape the randomness, to convince ourselves that universal truths do exist. Here, Paul decides that the aforementioned ghost wants him to find her daughter, who he soon learns is living in Scotland. After a thorough description of the B&B he's staying at, and the North Irish sailors he meets, and the sailing junket they take him on (which seems an excuse for Drury to toss in several pages of nautical jargon), Paul finds the daughter. She does not seem at all surprised that this stranger has sought her out because he's been sent by her mother's ghost to make sure she's okay. Instead, the two play a little golf, ride horses, and attend a play. This is toward the end of the book, when Drury's efforts at randomness have become fairly labored. One gets the sense even he has lost interest at this point. The mob henchmen reappear, but the situation with them remains unresolved. Paul's wife reappears, and the two get along fairly well, considering he left her at the airport nine months earlier. She has a new boyfriend, which is accepted by all parties with the same nonchalance that characterizes the rest of the story. Drury's descriptive powers are always sharp and occasionally funny but without some narrative or driving force to "The Black Brook," these observations become little more than clever tinkering. Someone described the book as a WPA project, which seems oddly accurate. The novel does a good job of portraying an aimless sociopath, but when the protagonist has no fears, no scruples, no motivations, this adds up to a dull journey for the reader.

[Jason Edwards · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's always hard to write about Tom Drury. For me. He makes Hemingway seem like an action-adventure novelist. Drury writes it down plain. Ultra plain. All tell, no show (which is how I like it). Even scenes of panic and violence come across as matter-of-fact, just someone telling you what happened, without any emotion.

But for all of that, he manages to sneak in a few incidents that keep you guessing. Are the ghosts real? Is the mob thing for real? Are we supposed to draw parallels between the two affairs, the accidental death/suicide/murder?

If I was smarter or better read I might be able to way in on the whole existential thing, compare Drury to other plain-spoke novels that keep it stark so you can examine without your feelings getting in the way of your investigation. But I don't know.

I just know that, when I start reading a novel by Drury, I kind of forget that I'm reading, until I'm done, and I'm not sure how much time has passed, but I always feel it was time well spent.

[Vivienne Strauss · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was a disappointment compared to others I've read by Drury - it was all over the place in plot. I did like some of the smaller characters and would have liked more of their backstories. Some characters didn't have much point at all.

[Dee Barsan · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a wonderful read! Drury is a treasure.

[Gurldoggie · Rating 5 out of 5]

A long and winding shaggy dog story of a novel. There is some vague plot - a crime is committed, a character disappears into a witness protection program, a child is born and a ghost appears. But the beauty of this novel is in the accumulation of episodes, the deadpan language, the unexpected cultural references, and the well drawn and invariably damaged characters. I found it to be a very accurate depiction of my contemporary daily life.

[Jesse · Rating 5 out of 5]

Drury is such good company. I was completely exhausted and overwhelmed while reading this book and usually fell asleep only a couple of pages in every night because I was in the midst of the biggest move/remodelling/unpacking of my life, but it was always fine to come home to.

[Ben Brackett · Rating 4 out of 5]

Drury is a magical storyteller.

[Patrick King · Rating 4 out of 5]

“A Marshall Tucker tribute band played for a while and then the show began, with the townspeople lying on the grass in the dark watching the orange fires overhead. Some had brought their dogs, an action that Paul could explain only in terms of that peculiar form of displaced narcissism that finds expression, for example, in the tying of red bandannas on golden retrievers. Certainly the dogs did not have fun, alternately bolting and cowering under lawn chairs. The spectators spoke longingly of “the grand finale” from the moment the fireworks began, and Paul wondered why such displays did not begin with the grand finale, thus greatly reducing the traffic jam at the end of the night. Ashes drifted down, and sometimes live sparks, which looked as if they would land far away but didn’t, and spectators received small, pinch-like burns.”

Here’s the thing about Tom Drury, even when he’s spinning his wheels you feel like you’re getting somewhere. “The Black Brook” is a strange book, caught between plots and locations and motivations. It’s a crime story and an art forgery story and a marriage story and a ghost story, but what really ties it all together are the little vignettes. You get these micro character studies that don’t really add anything to the great story, but accumulate in such a way that you have a fuller picture of how Paul (our main character) perceives the world. Why are any of these things happening? Oh, I don’t know, but it’s interesting to watch Paul inhabit space and navigate situations.

This passage is like the mission statement of the book: “Paul imagined the solid and cumulative lives of others, plotted lives, lives making some kind of sense, where if you did one thing, then you could reasonably expect another beneficial thing to follow. What he did not realize for a long time was that even people who live their lives as if this were the case could not refer to any proof. It’s just faith, and there’s nothing to be done about it.”

The writing was delightful and wry and poignant like all of Drury’s books and at the end of the day really just made me want to revisit “The End of Vandalism,” and is that really such a bad thing? A delightful mini character study/observation: “Long ago in Verona there was an old man who had made a habit of sitting on a chair in front of the grocery store and memorizing the license plates of everyone in town who drove past. This was more like what God did, Paul thought: maintained a numerical system that accounted for everyone, seemed arbitrary, and could not have been devised by anyone else. God was not love, God was math, but math that gave the appearance of love because it added up.”

One more choice line: “He smelled her skin, a warm sandy smell like pencil shavings.” Perfect.

[Mark · Rating 3 out of 5]

If you have scrolled down to read other reviews, you’ll see quite a range of opinion on this novel, and author Tom Drury’s writing in general. It’s hard to pin down what is appealing about a novel that doesn’t seem to go anywhere, leaving the reader wondering if they missed a bigger message. The truth is, I’m not sure there is a bigger message here. Drury seems to focus on simply describing the lives a few characters, in often ordinary circumstances, and just simply spin a tale for a while. This was particularly true of his debut The End of Vandalism. The Black Brook has a bit more structure, but I would not say that the basic literary elements (strong plot, climax, resolution, etc. ) exist. For readers accustomed to a cohesive structure, this may be frustrating.

So let’s see…..our protagonist Paul Emmons is an accountant who cooked the books for a few gangsters and ended up testifying against them. He goes into witness protection and flees to Belgium, where he runs a small inn with his wife. The relationship is rocky, and on a whim he returns home without his wife, takes a job as reporter with a small newspaper, and try to reconnect with his past. He moves in to an abandoned house owned by his college roommate, where years earlier a woman apparently committed suicide. The details are blurry, but the woman was the sister of his new boss at the newspaper. He begins to dig into her story and track down the woman’s daughter. Meanwhile, the gangsters learn of his return and make things uncomfortable. Those basic plot points might lead you to believe that this is a mystery novel of some sort, but it really isn’t. It’s a random, abstract, almost surreal series of events that don’t seem to relate to one another. Perhaps that’s Drury’s point, that life is disjointed and non-linear. In that way, maybe the story is much more realistic than it feels as you’re reading it. And it is often really funny in an incredibly dry way. It’s the humor, great dialogue, and some very fine writing that kept me from dropping this one, and in the end I liked it. If you’re looking for a story with a strong plot and a nice tidy resolution, you won’t find it here. Read this because it’s unlike most books you’ve probably read.

[Il Priorato Dei Bibliofili · Rating 3 out of 5]

🇺🇸Paul e sua moglie Mary, talentuosa falsaria, sono nati e cresciuti negli Stati Uniti ma da circa sei anni vivono e gestiscono un albergo nelle Ardenne, in Belgio.

I Due coniugi sono stati costretti ad abbandonare la loro casa a Providence e a cambiare identità dopo che Paul ha testimoniato contro l'organizzazione criminale guidata da Carlo Record, detto Tenaglia.

🇺🇲Incuranti dei rischi, Paul e Mary tornano di frequente negli Stati Uniti, fino a quando Paul, mosso dalla nostalgia, lascia Mary per tornare definitivamente in patria.

Una coppia di vecchi amici, Loom e Alice, gli offrono di vivere nel cottage accanto alla loro proprietà, ma Paul si innamora di Alice venendo anche scoperto dagli uomini del Tenaglia.

🖼️I criminali minacciano di uccidere sia lui che sua moglie Mary a meno che Paul non riesca a rubare un quadro intitolato "il torrente nero".

📖"Il talento di Paul Nash" è un romanzo estremamente particolare ad iniziare dal protagonista: egoista, egocentrico ed opportunista vive senza preoccuparsi di niente e di nessuno facendo tutto ciò che gli salta in mente.

📖Il viaggio di Paul, come scrive anche la traduttrice (che ha fatto un lavoro incredibile vista la particolarità dell'opera) ricorda molto le avventure di Huck Finn nel West, in un percorso di fuga dal mondo ma soprattutto da sé stesso, reinventandosi continuamente.

📖La narrazione tra balzi temporali e avventure varie riprende il caos del protagonista, risultando in alcuni tratti confusionaria e quasi "surreale", sia nelle vicende che nei dialoghi.

📖"Il talento di Paul Nash" con il suo black humor e i suoi personaggi sopra le righe è un romanzo divertente e anticonvenzionale, perfetto se cercate una lettura fuori dagli abituali canoni letterari.

[James Lewis · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the only one of Drury's five novels not placed in Iowa, from which Drury comes. It has the same flat prose style, the same odd cast of characters, and the same flashes of humor hiding in unadorned sentences.

While Drury's novels center more on character than on plot, this one has less plot than most--a slice of life of an amoral character who interacts with similarly unmoored characters. It will leave you wondering what has just happened and what you've missed until you realize you haven't missed anything. It was all about the journey.

I've been a Drury fan from his earliest short stories in Harper's, and while this wasn't my favorite, I thoroughly enjoyed it.

[Nick Milinazzo · Rating 3 out of 5]

A man in witness protection travels back and forth from his native New England to Europe and back again, driven not by fear but by his own heedless motivations. Like all of his novels there is a severity to the writing; but this book differs from all his others by the humor he imbues it with. For every deadly serious instance, Drury adds an element or conversation that makes it equally absurd. By far his funniest book, but it's a dark humor bordering on the surreal at times. It would be impossible to read Drury and not see the clear influence of DeLillo -- but he mixes postmodern with realism until the style is nearly incomparable to anyone. An interesting piece of absurdist satire.

[Dalla carta allo schermo · Rating 3 out of 5]

C'è chi cambia vita perché non sa cosa vuole o al contrario chi lo fa perché sa proprio cosa vuole. Può capitare però che si cambi vita per non aver dato la giusta importanza ad un evento. Ciò è quello che succede a Paul Nash, assoluto protagonista del romanzo, che si deve allontanare dagli Stati Uniti in quanto ha testimoniato in un processo contro il suo potente e losco datore di lavoro, per il quale faceva il contabile.
L'autore si conferma un bravo narratore e crea una storia poco convenzionale e originale, ma che in alcuni punti appare poco lineare e scorrevole.

Recensione completa nel blog www.dallacartalloschermo.com

[Alberto · Rating 3 out of 5]

Vivere alla giornata senza farsi troppe domande sulle conseguenze delle proprie azioni e su chi altro potrebbero colpire, questo è lo stile di vita del protagonista per tutto il romanzo.
Egoista ed egocentrico, senza più paure e tormenti del passato va incontro a qualsiasi cosa gli si presenti, alle volte anche in maniera del tutto senza senso.
Ci troveremo di fronte un uomo con mille difetti e dall'esistenza traballante, come un trapezista non sapremo fino alla fine se arriverà o meno dall'altra parte, se riuscirà a finire il suo percorso oppure cadrà sulla rete, sempre che la rete lo regga.

- Stavo facendo un sogno pazzesco.
Sai, quei sogni che fai quando non stai dormendo davvero?

[Laurie · Rating 4 out of 5]

The only reason I didn't give this five stars was that the turns in the plot were sometimes not smooth, I had to go back and remind myself of things that had happened earlier. But, as with The End of Vandalism, the dry wit of his writing is wonderful, and all his characters feel so real.

[Arjun · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a master of the craft. And what a fabulously (typically) low-key story about a man, about redemption and nostalgia, and about acceptance. In his deceptively nonchalant way, Drury paints the entire world.

[Peyton · Rating 4 out of 5]

Spare, dry, spooky, funny. A very strange book which similar to The End of Vandalism creates a colorful portrait of dull, suburban life made more interesting by absurd characters and circumstances. Doesn’t quite achieve the same level of impact as TEOV but a fun, eerie read nonetheless.

[Jeff · Rating 1 out of 5]

I love Tom Drury’s other books. This book, like his others, did have the occasional rye turn of phrase that made you reach for your highlighter. There is no question of his talent.

This books main story however does not develop as it should and leaves us grasping at the asides and not much else

[Hooper Bring]

When asked in an interview what book he is an evangelist for, Handler answered “Tom Drury's The Black Brook, a wise and hilarious and melancholy book which is overlooked even by fans of Tom Drury. I press it into the hands of strangers.”

[Robbieb · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mi sono piaciuti i dialoghi e le precise descrizioni. Ma manca il centro, ci sono tante divagazioni, storie plurime, sfondi diversi. E del protagonista non ho capito nulla.

[Dan Wever · Rating 4 out of 5]

Drury's McCarthy

[Tom Conwell · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tom Drury is great. For him a plot is just a container to hold great sentences. And he's always funny.

[John Welsh · Rating 5 out of 5]

This deadpan masterpiece, a novel about a man assuming a new identity when he barely had an old one to give up, is the the best work of one of the greatest American writers your friends have probably never heard of.
This was his best shot at fame, accessible and funny with a pre-publication chapter dramatised on BBC Radio 4 no less, but it made no visible mark on the literary landscape when it landed and is more-or-less forgotten now. The problem may be that its plot elements make it sound populist - the Mafia, adultery, art theft - but the treatment of those elements is so downbeat and opaque that the promised cheap thrills never quite turn up. That turns out to be a good thing, though, because by the time it meanders to an end this book has been just exactly thrilling enough, in its own quiet way.

If you read and enjoy this one (and you can get it second-hand for a penny), Drury has published another four novels, each excellent in its way. You can read them all in less time than it takes to get through one Jonathan Frantzen, and for all Frantzen's deserved acclaim (Frantzen himself seems to be an admirer of Drury, incidentally) you might wonder why one of these writers is famous when the other is not.

[Cory · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don't think I quite gave this book a fair shake. I read it over a few months, often just for a page or two at a time. Characters swirled around and I became too tired and lazy to look up who they were. Things happened, and then other things happened, but, at a certain point, I wanted them to stop happening so I could finish the book. Again, this has more to do with my current lifestyle and reading habits than it does the book, I'm sure. I was in a different place, literally and figuratively, when I read The End of Vandalism, and that was such a rich, full experience. This was scattered and fractured in comparison. But still some fine writing and good humor.

[Janis Williams · Rating 4 out of 5]

I just have to note this is the second novel I have read in which a character is in the witness protection program--in Spokane. But unlike Citizen Vince (which I recommend) this witness cannot tolerate Spokane and leaves for Belgium. Is Spokane a punchline? Is Belgium? The story caroms from New England to Belgium to Scotland, across the years with many odd and engaging characters and out-loud-laughs.

[Mark Desrosiers · Rating 2 out of 5]

This starts out as a hilarious page-turner seemingly involving a con-man and his wife hiding out in New England. The aimless whimsy combined with odd hardboiled details had me grinning and laughing. Then I noticed that by part II the aimless whimsy completely takes over. Then a ghost appears. As I stumbled to the finish it was all just a migraine-inducing aimless whimsy fest.

[Lisa McKenzie · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book follows the observations a self-decribed amoral man. "To be amoral was not to be evil but merely to march to a different drum." If you give up your expectations of the usual cause-effect, right-wrong axis most novels spin around, you might find this one to have a beautiful view.

[Chris · Rating 3 out of 5]

A somewhat meandering novel that's part gangster story/part divorce tale with some ghosts thrown in for good measure. There was so much going on, I found it hard to keep track of characters and plot lines.

[michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

Written Valium I say