The Review of Contemporary Fiction
Drought by Debra DiBlasiMonique Dufour
Debra DiBlasi. Drought. New Directions, 1997. 89 pp. Paper: $10.95.
Drought opens on “House” in June heat. It takes up barely half the page. Turn the page. There is “Woman,” Willa, on verso, and on recto, an evaporating pond “Drowning in air.” It is a film of a novella, stringing scene after scene with titled chapters, each filling less than a page and heaving sighs of white space.
The book is shaped to call attention to reading as an act of seeing. Similarly, DiBlasi’s prose technique reminds the reader that she is looking, staring, at private moments. She moves the reader’s eyes from “a wooden table” to “a misshapen tube of oil paint” to the woman’s body, where “a brown strand of hair falls from her chignon onto her white neck where tiny beads of sweat gather, slide away, then gather again.” With equal precision and objectivity, she describes the precise layout of the house, the milky eyes of a dead calf fetus, the couple in their bed, and the erection in the man’s pants as he reads a romance novel, Tropical Heat, in the cab of his pickup truck.
Drought accumulates the images that tell the story of a man and a woman from June to September as a drought ravages their cattle ranch. In many ways, the story is an ordinary one. Plenty of people wait for rain and lose their farms. Still more couples argue. What’s interesting about Drought is how it sustains the tension between the generic elements of tragedy and its precise manifestation in the mundane details of everyday life. [Monique Dufour]