the shipping news sparknotes literature guide annie proulx

But there is, too, a serious disappointment in Accordion Crimes, where, as in her promising first novel, Postcards, an arbitrary decision about the novelistic structure cramps her freedom. They are books primarily of place, where a dauntless spirit of inventive improvisation and passionate devotion to arcane detail rules over more ordinary virtues. In my view, she has written two of the great American novels of the last 25 years, in The Shipping News and That Old Ace in the Hole.

Proulx is an unpredictable writer, whose career has sometimes tested the patience of even the most sympathetic admirer. But are those flashes enough? Barkskins in the end seems to me a work of profound error, in which a novelist’s conscious decisions have done a good deal to suppress what that novelist can do best. There are individual chapters of great dramatic force, as Proulx’s people confront the possibilities before them and produce their own solutions. A man on board a ship, as the temperature plummets, sees all those around him embedded in ice before the catastrophe falls on him a logging run down a river blocks, builds and explodes with the force of missiles a wall of fire sweeps across a forested wildness. In Annie Proulx’s new novel, there are breath-taking pages and set pieces of extraordinary power.

In spurts and bursts and flashes, a sublime novelist at work reveals herself.

The shipping news sparknotes literature guide annie proulx