Book Review: The Book of Rusty

Bill Fairs

The Book of Rusty by Benjamin Drevlow, Cowboy Jamboree Press, 2022

Reviewed by Scott Neuffer

Well, I’m not a Jack Mormon. I’m an apostate, which is different. Seeing Benjamin Drevlow’s 2022 novel of sorts, The Book of Rusty, formatted like The Book of Mormon is fun.

It is fun because Rusty is a miscreant with no wisdom to impart. He is a pervert. He is highly offensive. In fact, I’m not sure I like Rusty. He wallows in the tragedy of his brother’s suicide. He has a small penis. He is whiny. But I like Drevlow for writing Rusty’s story, for trying to get at something.

From what we know, Rusty is a farm kid who becomes a janitor at a college, while trying to make it as a writer. He is a semi-decent basketball player. He also obsesses over his college teacher in unhealthy ways. And over his past love interest, Sheila. His fantasies are mixed with visions of his brother’s suicide. He is never far from tragedy. He wants to show his ma he’s a writer. Of Rusty’s life, Drevlow creates a working-class ethos that is at once vulgar and aspirational. We root for Rusty along the way as he travels, in time, from one humiliation to another.

The Book of Rusty doesn’t fall entirely into metabro, that genre of writing that elevates alienated masculinity to sainthood with self-aware narrative techniques. Neither is the dirty realism here an objective portraiture of the working class. Thanks to Drevlow’s writing, the prose makes a metatwang, a rhythmic meditation on what is rustic and lost within us, like a dissertation on the blues. Drevlow is at his best building a clipped rhythm. The most poignant passages revolve around not only Rusty’s relationship with his mother, but a pair of sheep he tries to tend to as a child, the father ram killing the son:

“And now here I am, the curse, it’s come back to rear its ugly head. Here I am, not even a man, and already the blood is on my hands, and the blood shall be on my hands.”

Before we know it — in a shift of authorial mode — Rusty is back in the third person, “in the depths of piss and shit.” As a janitor, he routinely locks himself in the ladies room to write in his notebooks. This compulsion to write gives the dirty realism of the book its life. The compulsion means something — how to carve a life out of emotional chaos. We want Rusty to write, to find something in his writing even if that something never comes.

Drevlow writes his protagonist deftly, exhaustively, and we must applaud him for it. The Book of Rusty has enough enticing grit to create more apostates from what is deemed normal, and enough distinct style to make Drevlow a writer to watch.