The End of Vandalism

A thief vacuums the church before stealing the chalice....A lonely woman paints her toenails in a drafty farmhouse....A sleepless man watches his restless bride scatter their bills beneath the stars....Welcome to Grouse County...."Tom Drury's loving, wryly intelligent take on Grouse County is at once sophisticated and compassionate. Drury's prose is quietly heartbreaking, laugh-out-loud funny, and always, absolutely convincing. The End of Vandalism marks the beginning of a distinguished American career."--Jayne Anne Phillips"Remarkable...Every so often a debut novel appears that simply stuns you with the elegance and beauty of its writing....A+"--Entertainment Weekly"So amiably dense with anecdote and observation, the reader is bounced along by its energy....Grouse County is unabashedly American, a setting both nostalgic and wittily contemporary....In a sense, the main character is the county itself, with its eccentricities, rituals, quarrels and comforts."--The Boston Sunday Globe"Brilliant, wonderfully funny...It's hard to think of any novel--let alone a first novel--in which you can hear the people so well. This is indeed deadpan humor, and Tom Drury is its master."--Annie Dillard"Rich and readable...[Drury] possesses his made-up world with the same authority Sherwood Anderson brought to Winesburg, Ohio, and Faulkner to Yoknapatawpha County....The many characters who walk their separate paths end up weaving each other inside a mysterious pattern, in which they themselves are also caught."--USA TodayChosen by New York magazine and Publishers Weekly asONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF 1994