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The Driftless Trilogy #1
The Driftless Zone: Or a Novel Concerning the Selective Outmigration from Small Cities
A darkly comic novel that recalls the style of Raymond Chandler and film noir features a hero named Spleen whose affair with a woman called The Sneering Brunette embroils him in crime and intrigue. A first novel.
Hardcover
First published June 15, 1997
1 person is currently reading
124 people want to read
About the author
Rick Harsch
21 books295 followersPublisher, chief editor of corona\samizdat press; Izola, Slovenia....www.corona\samizdat press; rick.harsch@gmail.com
The Manifold Destiny of Eddie Vegas, a novel;
and
Walk Like a Duck, a Season of Little League Baseball in Italy
As of April 24, 2020, these two books are available in a world edition from corona/samizdat, as explained in the following youtube video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4JUl...
I have finished a two volume anthological novel, The Assassination of Olof Palme, a an anthological novel, which involves the contributions of at least 50 writers from about 20 countries, and extracts the fungus of the Reagan years, montagerates the murderous manners of secretive Nato/CIA folk in Post WWII Europe, particularly in Italy and France, pays some attention to the Assassination of Olof Palme, while exploring a sort of alternative notion of the autobiographical novel and putting an end to proofreading.
Skulls of Istria, published by River Boat Books, June 26, 2018
Not available on Amazon, only direct from:
http://www.riverboatbooks.com/our-books
Voices After Evelyn was published by Maintenance Ends Press, the Avant Garde wing of Ice Cube Press, in November of 2018
This novel is available at 19.95, from http://www.icecubepress.com/
Author of three novels published by Steerforth press:
The Driftless Zone
Billy Verite
The Sleep of Aborigines
[The Driftless Trilogy]
These three were published in translation in France, two were subsequently chosen for mass market publication and I received a copy of each before the press went bankrupt.
Author of a chapter in Creative Nonfiction's Anatomy of Baseball, prefaced by Yogi Berra.
Living now in Slovenia, where Amalietti&Amalietti of Ljubljana has published:
Several of my own novels have now been published by corona\samizdat, along with works by
Chandler Brossard
David Vardeman
Vesna Radić
Jeff Bursey
Bori Praper,
and coming soon
WD Clarke
Joao Reis
Mark Douglas
Phillip Freedenberg (with Jeff Walton)
Jomme Keller
Giuliano Vivaldi (with a co-translator)
Roberto Alt
Prasenjit Gupta
Zachary Tanner
and more
Arjun and the Good Snake (memoir)
and, in Slovene:
Arjun in dobra kača
and the novels:
Kramberger z opico (Kramberger with Monkey)
Adriatica Deserta
Istrske Lobanje (The Skulls of Istria)
2019:the novel Voices after Evelyn by a new imprint of Ice Cube Press (Iowa)
here is a review by Chris Via: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NISsr...
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
December 17, 2019
"Noirdreams"
The Driftless Zone is the first book in the Driftless Trilogy, and Rick Harsch's first novel. You will notice very quickly that the author is a virtuoso of the English language, with a talent equal to Jack Kerouac's, but a voice all his own.
The driftless zone is what the small city becomes once all the beautiful, brilliant and productive citizens have left for greener pastures. It is grotesque and narrow and corrupt. This setting is ripe for luscious and wry observations from the viewpoint of Spleen, and the derelict denizens that drift through his mystifying life. This is where dreams and slow burn Noir converge, and the loneliness of urban nomads, unattached pseudo-humans, and upstream swimmers in the dirty undercurrent meet in the commerce of want, the joy of dissolution, and the haunt of hurt. We explore through the dark and elegant poetry of Harsch's productive prose, which constantly reaches further than rhythm and words, straddling deep alleys of meaning and collage, the startling peculiarities of these city slickers. Undoubtedly, the atmosphere and ripe imagery will linger indefinitely in the mind. Coupled with pigeons, fish and mayflies, engaged in their own arcane microcosmic tragedies, a superstitious and constantly curious main character encapsulates the themes and accompanying conflicts with cinematic aplomb. Sprinkled with morsels of philosophy, this book operates through
complex sentences injected with poetic meaning, such as:
"Between buildings softened by the thick mist moths live their absurd looping lives out in the skirts of doomed light."
The language requires you to slow down, chew and savor the intense flavor of the words.
As the players endlessly try to outrun destiny, responsibility, and even meaning their lives of desperate flight, escape and tension had my eyes riveted to the page.
The Driftless Zone is the first book in the Driftless Trilogy, and Rick Harsch's first novel. You will notice very quickly that the author is a virtuoso of the English language, with a talent equal to Jack Kerouac's, but a voice all his own.
The driftless zone is what the small city becomes once all the beautiful, brilliant and productive citizens have left for greener pastures. It is grotesque and narrow and corrupt. This setting is ripe for luscious and wry observations from the viewpoint of Spleen, and the derelict denizens that drift through his mystifying life. This is where dreams and slow burn Noir converge, and the loneliness of urban nomads, unattached pseudo-humans, and upstream swimmers in the dirty undercurrent meet in the commerce of want, the joy of dissolution, and the haunt of hurt. We explore through the dark and elegant poetry of Harsch's productive prose, which constantly reaches further than rhythm and words, straddling deep alleys of meaning and collage, the startling peculiarities of these city slickers. Undoubtedly, the atmosphere and ripe imagery will linger indefinitely in the mind. Coupled with pigeons, fish and mayflies, engaged in their own arcane microcosmic tragedies, a superstitious and constantly curious main character encapsulates the themes and accompanying conflicts with cinematic aplomb. Sprinkled with morsels of philosophy, this book operates through
complex sentences injected with poetic meaning, such as:
"Between buildings softened by the thick mist moths live their absurd looping lives out in the skirts of doomed light."
The language requires you to slow down, chew and savor the intense flavor of the words.
As the players endlessly try to outrun destiny, responsibility, and even meaning their lives of desperate flight, escape and tension had my eyes riveted to the page.
September 26, 2021
Diss-claimer:In Thomas Ruggles Pynchon's much-underappreciated novel, Vineland, a character named Hector Zuñiga plays himself playing a cop in the movie made for TV of the story of his life* (as he imagines it, at least). In other words, he's learned how to behave as a cop by watching cop shows on the TV—becoming so addicted to them in the process that he is forced into an institution for "Tubal Detox" by the shadowy Powers that Be. But then Hector escapes from rehab, of course, and, well, let's just say that things then go somewhat awry….
In this excellent first novel by Rick Harsch, we encounter a clutch of low-lifes (low-level hitmen, low-browed police detectives, low -born and -bred natives of our setting, Lacrosse, Wisconsin —itself a lower-tier low-rise city at the very lowest tide of its post-industrial fortunes) all of whom unconsciously enact a noirish drama which could be mistaken for low comedy in the hands of many another author.
Yet Rick Harsch, even at the very outset of his career here (circa 1997) is in complete control of his materials: first of all, he has what appears to this novice to be an encyclopedic knowledge of the cinematic Noir, as his metafictional, intrusive-but-more-than-welcome narrator takes great pains to compare & contrast the predestined (because all-too-human) movements of his principal characters with such films as Out of the Past (1947). In fact, I would go so far as to say that the authorial ruminative/contemplative digressions or excursions themselves are what really made the book for me, grounding the narrative somehow, or unveiling the covert or latent gravitas in the lives of these errant, erring ne'er-do-wells, these folks who might have lived their lives differently than they have and will, if only they had gotten out of Dodge or Lacrosse before the grooves in its tarmac determined the grooves in that sad-sack, not-so-longplaying record** of their foredoomed lives….
The second reason this debut novel succeeds is that Harsch is in complete control of his use of language as well. I've already quoted in my previous updates [edit: these are located in the trilogy/omnibus version, not here] some of the bits that roused and then roiled me, but here's another, which also gives some insight as to why a place like a small city in south-west Wisconsin (the literal geological "Driftless Zone" left untouched by the Whig Theory of History, it seems, avoided even by the glaciers during the ice-age) is such fertile terrain for an inquiry into what the tradition of Film Noir has to tell us about the human condition—the "I" intruding on the third-person narrative here, by the way, counts himself, a cab-driving card-carrying member of the Pynchonian Preterite among the hard-boiled dreamers of which he writes:
Spengler said the urban nomad can never leave the city because the city is inside him; he's condemned to wander burdened by the weight of a millennium of elaborate excuses for concrete and the repetition of automatons – the structures of the city recur in the way he thinks, operates his limbs, delegates responsibility to his senses; his home, his lost Atlantis, waits for him across a vast desert that cannot be crossed without the money belt that eventually breaks him down to die under the vultures, smiling finally at the paradise of his folly.Not the folly of his paradise, but the paradise of his folly: the many varieties of mercifully deluded pigeons*** who people this polis, who never fail to come to the fork-in-the-road and take it, who nail themselves to the many crossroads of Lacrosse, can reveal themselves to be as touchingly human as they are by turns automatons and ciphers, and who tend, this being Noir after all, to possess lifespans as brief (not "as woman's love", contrary to the Hamlet-in-my-mind, but—) as that most ephemeral and individually harmless of creatures, the ephemeropteran, or common Mayfly—which, when they swarm the streets of your own AnyHowTown, may indeed resemble some biblical plague, may well make you cry havoc, but are soon but a fading memory of one climacterical day as one season gives way yet again to the next, leaving no trace behind.
TLDR: This is one page-turner that not only gets inside the genre whose tropes and shibboleths it is interrogating, it also gets inside you, and I for one will definitely be reading books #2 (Billy Verite) and #3 (The Sleep of Aborigines ) this fall, as well as buying the books used in hardcover, as however cute this phat little phucker is (I'm actually reading the omnibus edition The Driftless Trilogy ), this individual novel deserves a life of its own—and would have one, too, if, breaking-free from your own past someday and on a Greyhound bound for Anywhere, you discover it on an empty seat across from you that had been occupied by a sneering brunette, and who looked just the type to abandon a book—or a heart....
*
**
***
January 10, 2016
This is an entirely unique book, like all the books in this trilogy. I loved it when it came out, and I still think about it. On the sentence level, Harsch is as good as it gets.
May 17, 2020
A screeching pigeon comes across the sky.
With a nod to Mr Pynchon, that was my brain processing the opening imagery of Rick Harsch’s initial volume in his Driftless Trilogy. Thirty pigeons launch through the sky “in an arc so grand” – and abruptly pigeons, those Columba livia domestica of omens, snitches, statues, soap bar carvings, and suckers, intrude upon the novel, taunting the characters with their effortless freedom, relentlessly tormenting, like harpies, the Driftlessites of La Crosse. They appear everywhere “winged morons, going nowhere.”
Meanwhile, the aimless misfits and mutants, schizoids, cops-on-the-take and -on-the-make, psychos, snitches, noir-men, hitmen and dental men, geeks, freaks, hack drivers, private dicks and chicks, drift through the metaphysical gloom of the glacierally bereft city of La Crosse, Wisconsin.
Spleen witnesses Jimmy Lafly, Jr, leap from the Cass Street Bridge, which leads him to Lafly Senior’s antique shop where he runs into the Sneering Brunette, ex-girlfriend of gangster Deke Dobson, upon which, one thing leading to another, as things will, Spleen and Sneer “get it on” as Marvin would say, raising the ire of Deke Dobson who then enlists hitman Richie Buck, he who recently departed the Greyhound bus as noticed by stakeout man Billy Verité, to break both of Spleen’s legs, who is already implicated in the Sherri Holloway case by dirty cop Stratton. And so on.
The Driftless adrift in the Driftless Zone. Dairyland’s Bermuda Triangle.
And then there’s the ever-present narrator, from time to time commenting and philosophizing on the goings on, as if he were sitting with Tom Servo riffing on the action. There is so much packed into these 200 pages that, though seemingly a quick read, you’ll want to read it again. Pronto. ASAP. The novel rewards you. Noir film references abound. Pages-long digressions. Lists.
Then there is the novel’s subtitle: Or A Novel Concerning the Selective Outmigration from Small Cities. In short, the young – supposedly the best and the brightest – tend to flee the small cities in search of more opportunity, higher wages, and more arts and entertainment in the larger metro parts of the country, the world. In the words of the demographer from Chicago, so says our narrator, this is what accounts for what is missing from small cities, ‘the beautiful and the talented.’ That explains the cast of misfits we find here.
Having been an ‘outmigrator’ at one time myself, leaving a small city for the big, then returning to the small 30 years later for peace and quiet, I found this aspect of the novel particularly interesting. I don’t consider myself particularly beautiful or talented, so he might have a point.
Back to the novel. Buy it. Read it. It’s wonderfully dark, humorous, and full of pigeon stories. The fact that the author lived and worked in La Crosse is evident in the portrayal of the Driftless City, though the names I’m sure have been changed to protect the guilty.
I can’t wait to continue the saga with Billy Verité. He’s a real Noir-Man, sitting in his nowhere land.
With a nod to Mr Pynchon, that was my brain processing the opening imagery of Rick Harsch’s initial volume in his Driftless Trilogy. Thirty pigeons launch through the sky “in an arc so grand” – and abruptly pigeons, those Columba livia domestica of omens, snitches, statues, soap bar carvings, and suckers, intrude upon the novel, taunting the characters with their effortless freedom, relentlessly tormenting, like harpies, the Driftlessites of La Crosse. They appear everywhere “winged morons, going nowhere.”
Meanwhile, the aimless misfits and mutants, schizoids, cops-on-the-take and -on-the-make, psychos, snitches, noir-men, hitmen and dental men, geeks, freaks, hack drivers, private dicks and chicks, drift through the metaphysical gloom of the glacierally bereft city of La Crosse, Wisconsin.
Spleen witnesses Jimmy Lafly, Jr, leap from the Cass Street Bridge, which leads him to Lafly Senior’s antique shop where he runs into the Sneering Brunette, ex-girlfriend of gangster Deke Dobson, upon which, one thing leading to another, as things will, Spleen and Sneer “get it on” as Marvin would say, raising the ire of Deke Dobson who then enlists hitman Richie Buck, he who recently departed the Greyhound bus as noticed by stakeout man Billy Verité, to break both of Spleen’s legs, who is already implicated in the Sherri Holloway case by dirty cop Stratton. And so on.
The Driftless adrift in the Driftless Zone. Dairyland’s Bermuda Triangle.
And then there’s the ever-present narrator, from time to time commenting and philosophizing on the goings on, as if he were sitting with Tom Servo riffing on the action. There is so much packed into these 200 pages that, though seemingly a quick read, you’ll want to read it again. Pronto. ASAP. The novel rewards you. Noir film references abound. Pages-long digressions. Lists.
Then there is the novel’s subtitle: Or A Novel Concerning the Selective Outmigration from Small Cities. In short, the young – supposedly the best and the brightest – tend to flee the small cities in search of more opportunity, higher wages, and more arts and entertainment in the larger metro parts of the country, the world. In the words of the demographer from Chicago, so says our narrator, this is what accounts for what is missing from small cities, ‘the beautiful and the talented.’ That explains the cast of misfits we find here.
Having been an ‘outmigrator’ at one time myself, leaving a small city for the big, then returning to the small 30 years later for peace and quiet, I found this aspect of the novel particularly interesting. I don’t consider myself particularly beautiful or talented, so he might have a point.
Back to the novel. Buy it. Read it. It’s wonderfully dark, humorous, and full of pigeon stories. The fact that the author lived and worked in La Crosse is evident in the portrayal of the Driftless City, though the names I’m sure have been changed to protect the guilty.
I can’t wait to continue the saga with Billy Verité. He’s a real Noir-Man, sitting in his nowhere land.
Want to read
November 21, 2023extract: Spengler said the urban nomad can never leave the city because the city is inside him; he's condemned to wander burdened by the weight of a millennium of elaborate excuses for concrete and the repetition of automatons – the structures of the city recur in the way he thinks, operates his limbs, delegates responsibility to his senses; his home, his lost Atlantis, waits for him across a vast desert that cannot be crossed without the money belt that eventually breaks him down to die under the vultures, smiling finally at the paradise of his folly.
June 7, 2020
A wonderfully mangled noir, unencumbered by plot: surprising, beautiful, raunchy-- and funny as hell. Nasty hit man comes to town (small, and mid-western); the listless protagonist is messing around with the wrong woman; pigeons (alive and dead) abound; and the local insect population soars. Great dialog, great sentences, unforgettable scenes.
August 1, 2019
Not worth my time.
November 5, 2025
A noir detective novel about La Crosse! How cool is that!
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews