Benjamin Drevlow’s The Book of Rusty is unlike any other. It’s 390 pages of raw Rusty, a young man’s “mem-wah” about his coming-of-age struggles. Rusty is the outsider looking in, dealing with the loss of his older brother to suicide. Subtitled Another Testament of Benjamin Drevlow, it’s one hell of an intense testimony. Rusty is a complicated soul. Is he a lovable loser? An antihero? Is he just a young man trying to make his way through the world in the face of great loss? Don’t let the Testament mislead you. There’s pretty much no other book like this that I know of. Trying to put a label on Rusty reminds me of Axl introducing Slash at the Ritz in 1988:
In a world that he did not create, but he will go through it as if it was his own making, half-man, half-beast, I’m not sure what it is, but whatever it is, it’s weird, it’s pissed off, and it calls itself Slash.
Maybe it’s Bukowski’s step-grandson. Influenced by the old man, but not of the same bloodline. Maybe it’s like HBO’s Eastbound & Down but where our Kenny Powers never makes it beyond the high school baseball team and the tragic comedy has more tragedy than comedy. Maybe it’s the poster boy of almost every possible trigger warning. Told via short paragraphs, sentences that may or not be complete, in a tense somewhere between past, present, and future, the book creates its own vernacular. The Book of Rusty for sure is unique and honest and passionate and gutsy and sincerely twisted. It’s also a classic example of the power of the small press publishing things that more people should hear about and read and share.
To wrap my head around the book, I will look both at what happens in Rusty’s world and at how he chooses to write it. These are the two unique pieces of how it all becomes “Another Testament of Benjamin Drevlow.”
Rusty’s Journey
The Book of Rusty is Rusty’s mem-wah, his way of self-deprecating the intimacy of a memoir, if he can make fun of the world, it can hurt him a little less than it seems hell bent on hurting. He starts us at the beginning of his writing journey, writing The Book of Ronny in his mom’s seventh grade language arts class. The Book of Ronny is a similar device for Rusty, this time using fiction to hide the horror of losing his brother, the inciting incident of a life of losing for Rusty. Of course, sharing his story to seventh-grade classmates goes wrong, but in some ways it leads Rusty on the journey of eventually writing his story, eventually getting the world back:
No, Rusty telling himself one day he’d write the funniest frickin’ story about suicide ever and show everybody how stupid it was to feel sorry for him … No, Rusty tells himself, what you do for that little pudgy crybaby mama’s boy is you laugh your sorry asses off at how funny things can be. Suicide, Twinkies, Time-Traveling. Heaven and Hell and straight ballin’. Nothing but ballin’ and ballin’.
The mission of dealing with his brother’s death, the fallout afterwards, growing up, and dealing with his parents is quickly established as the framework of the book along with the foreshadow of a climax on a bridge involving Rusty’s own flirtation with calling it quits for good. How he will live through this and how we will tell us the story is the engine of the novel. And quite the engine it is. It’s loud, it sputters, you can’t ever quite relax and assume it will get you where you want to go, but dammit, you can’t afford to replace it either.
Rusty is fully aware of his situation. He uses humor to make light of it, which in turn, of course, highlights his depth. Here, in effect, he draws the funniest Comp Title possible, comparing his story to Good Will Hunting. Just imagine Drevlow pitching his book to New York this way:
What it is, it’s sorta like that one movie with the genius janitor doing math problems, except in this case it’s just a horny janitor with a bunch of sad pathetic stories.
Sure, his story does involve a horny janitor with a bunch of sad pathetic stories. That much is true. But it’s for sure that it’s not “just” that. It’s a grieving story. It’s a coming-of-age story. It’s a story about facing all the shit that world throws at all of us, not just at Rusty. No one is undefeated. We all face the same challenges. We all understand Rusty. We might have to laugh at him, but in the end, we just want to pick him up, dust him off, tell him it’s going to be okay even if we don’t fully believe it. That’s the magic Drevlow is pulling off from start to finish. What appears on its face to be light in texture is actually very deep, has a lot to say beyond the deprecating humor on the surface. Robert McKee says “How the person chooses to act under pressure is who he is—the greater the pressure, the truer and deeper the revelation of character.” I’m not sure more pressure could have been exerted upon Rusty. For a good example of this extremity, and how far Drevlow is willing to take this premise, just read the chapter titled “INSERT RANDOM FLASHBACK TO THAT RECURRING FANTASY/NIGHTMARE WHERE RUSTY FALLS ASLEEP IN THE LADIES’ ROOM.”
Perhaps at the peak of this pressure, Rusty eases off the humor and obfuscation (as much he can at least) and has this moment of questioning:
Done pissin’ and moanin’ about everything else. Gonna learn to accept it, he’s telling himself. Maybe that’s the whole key to happiness, he’s telling himself. Learn to forget about happiness and to accept that true happiness wasn’t an option for pathetic whiny retard mama’s boys like Rusty in the first place.
It’s not there in the text, but I believe there is a subtext Drevlow is planting that we all “get” including Rusty. This subtext is in the space between the truth and the exaggeration. The deep truth that is in this text’s upfront honesty, but also the truths underneath the exaggeration, the intentional lie that softens the harder to accept ranges of the big truths. Rusty says things we know aren’t true and we feel that he knows they aren’t always true too. This is the stuff hard to admit. This is the stuff that’s easier to face when its bent. Rusty and Drevlow keep in that space forming a unique combination of defense mechanism distance and raw in your face vulnerability. In the end then it also becomes a story about storytelling. Doing whatever it took to get it told is Rusty’s biggest victory.
Rusty’s Syntax
One way that Drevlow accomplishes this control of distance is through the syntactical forms he uses as the spine of the novel. They seem to have three main components: the chapter titles, the short paragraphs, and a strange vernacular that for now I will call “The Rusty.”
The chapter titles are a serious of phrases in all capitals somewhat reminiscent of Twain’s chapters in the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, of course with the Rusty and Drevlow flavor. So, for a randomly pulled sample:
LET US ONCE AGAIN BACKTRACK TO OUR CLUBBING DAYS, SHALL WE? TROUBLE ARRIVES & ITS NAME IS BRUCEY
These titles allow Drevlow to do a couple things. It’s another chance to be self-deprecating and make the heavy seem lighter by making fun of it. It also seems to be a way for there to be a blend of the Drevlow and the Rusty. Is this voice Rusty? It’s not quite the same voice. It has a “we” and it talks to us directly in a way that Rusty doesn’t. Could this be an additional narrator and we’re getting to hear the voice of God, ahem—Drevlow?
The short paragraph element is self-defining, the whole book is mostly made up of three to five sentence long paragraphs. It helps with the velocity of reading, but it also mirrors the way Rusty’s brain likely works. No messing around, we got to get the stuff out and keep it moving. It’s not like it’s “just the facts, ma’am.” This is more than reporting facts, it will take its dives around, but it will do so in short paragraphs, and it will move on.
Now for the syntactical form I am hereby coining “The Rusty.” It either has a true fancy term some English majors smarter than me know or Drevlow has flat out invented it. Here’s my best attempt at representing the form and then I will try to include a couple demonstrations:
Brief Proposition + “What Rusty” + past tense verb phrase
So, a one or two sentence that forms a proposition involving a subject and a verb but without much previous foundation. This is then followed up by the “What” construct, usually Rusty as the subject with some past tense verb such as “What Rusty was thinking” or “What Rusty told them” or “What Rusty really wanted to tell them but didn’t.”
For a basic example:
It’s a trap! What Rusty should have been thinking but isn’t.
Sometimes the What precedes the proposition, but it’s the same form, this is the full paragraph:
What Rusty’s ma always forgets about, Rusty’s not so starring role at home where Ray’s that apple of the old man’s eye, and Dickie not far behind.
After this form is established, a shorthand version of it develops where the paragraph might just have the parts following the proposition, leaving that to the assumed:
How Rusty goes and lets his ma brainwash him into going back to school. Thinking some chickenshit book full of martyr-me mem-wahs could make up for all the other things.
At first, this was a little jarring as a reader. It reminded me of reading A Clockwork Orange and having to learn the vernacular of Alex’s hoodlum world. The initial effects to us might be doubt that we can get used to it, that we can learn how this new world works, or maybe that it’s even worth the work, but the results are similar to Burgess’ where it slowly (and magically) binds us to the world. It starts to make sense and not being in that voice would seem jarring. The other thing that both of these books do with this is throttle it at the appropriate times. Not putting quotes in here that could spoil the finish, but as you read if for yourself, notice where Rusty really faces his hard truths head-on, and notice this pattern loosen and slightly return to more conventional prose as if the flow of Rusty’s mind is also changing. That’s the magic stuff right there. That’s the light bulb where you realize holy shit, this lovable loser story is also a genius story. It is like that Ben Affleck and Matt Damon movie after all!
It would be easy to think the grit of The Book of Rusty is in the toilet humor or the edges the likes to push. But the real grit is under all of that, in the hard-fought truth seeking, dare taking, doing whatever it takes to get Rusty’s Testament down on paper, raw for all to see. Rusty tells us exactly what he’s going to do right the in the mock epigraph, secretly doing the very thing it makes fun of and always doing things the Rusty way:
Some real witty and profound quote taken from a book you’ve never heard of to convince you just how fucking wise and deep and well-read I am. Well, I got your witty and profound right here [grabs junk].
The Book of Rusty, by Benjamin Drevlow. Independently Published, October 2022. 390 pages. $15.99, paper.
Al Kratz is a writer from Des Moines, Iowa. He’s the author of The Tony Bone Stories from Ad Hoc Fiction and Off the Resting Sea from above/ground press. More of his writing can be found at alkratz.com.
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