FICTION IN REVIEW

1 4 0 Y F I C T I O N I N R E V I E W D A V I D G A L E F What does it mean to be a quintessentially American writer? America by now has gone in too many directions to characterize, but the previous two centuries showed a veneration of the open road, the sweeping vista, the natural world, and the frontier; the American novel as a vast canvas with a focus on hard-bitten romantics slightly larger than life, idiosyncratic characters with a predilection for violence, and expansive language to cover this territory . The writer himself, with an emphasis on ‘‘him,’’ tended to be a tough guy with a long list of odd jobs and places he’d been. It was a life of opportunity and second chances (Fitzgerald’s declaration ‘‘There are no second acts in American lives’’ is plain wrong). Annie Proulx, a writer of great scope and beauty, follows that path. In her early work – the short story collection Heart Songs, the novel Postcards – she traces the lives of the rural poor and the down-and-out, and their attempts to make good or evil. By the time the novel The Shipping News was published in 1993, Proulx was firmly in her element: intricate descriptions of desolate seaB a r k s k i n s : A N o v e l , by Annie Proulx (Scribner’s, 736 pp., $32) 1 4 1 R scape and tormented individuals. On any given page of that novel, you’re likely to spot marvels: ‘‘Billy Pretty warned, pointed to the northeast horizon at violet clouds pulled from a point as a silk scarf is pulled from a wedding ring. In the southwest they saw rival billows in fantastic patterns, as though a paper marbler had worked through them with his combs making French curls, cascades and winged nonpareil fountains.’’ Proulx endows Newfoundland , in all its isolation and idiosyncratic weather, with a desperate appeal. The Shipping News won a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award, and the Irish Times International Fiction Prize. After that, Proulx moved on to Wyoming, with its own brutal weather, its cowboys and rodeo riders and hard-luck ranchers. Three story collections followed: Deep Range, Bad Dirt, and Fine Just the Way It Is, as well as the novel That Old Ace in the Hole. She also published a house-building memoir called Bird Cloud, which tells us more about concrete flooring and the wind around the North Platte River than about Annie Proulx. We learn that she’s of French Canadian ancestry, tough-minded, deeply concerned about the land, and no longer as young as she used to be. Her new novel, Barkskins, is extremely ambitious, an attempt to sum up the history of a territory through its logging. Though ‘‘barkskins ’’ refers to a species of woodcutter, Proulx in the dedication includes all manner of loggers, ecologists, ‘‘foresters, ring counters and the rest of us.’’ It’s a multigenerational chronicle of French Canadians and Native Americans, a paean to nature and a curse against those who ravage the forests. Beginning in the 1600s in New France, the precursor to Canada, it introduces two men who will help develop an entire industry, René Sel and Charles Duquet: In twilight they passed bloody Tadoussac, Kébec and Trois Rivières and near dawn moored at a remote riverbank settlement . René Sel, sti√ black hair, slanted eyes, yeux bridés – in ancient times invading Huns had been at his people – heard someone say ‘‘Wobik.’’ Mosquitoes covered their hands and necks like fur. A man with yellow eyebrows pointed them at a rain-dark house. Mud, rain, biting insects and the odor of willows made the first impression of New France. The second impression was of dark, vast forest, inimical wilderness. 1 4 2 G A L E F Y The vast, brooding presence of the forest makes for a heart of darkness worthy of Conrad, with just as many evocative descriptions . The prose bears non-kin relationships to Barbara Kingsolver ’s The Poisonwood Bible (‘‘First, picture the forest’’) and the idiosyncratic scenes from eighteenth-century America in Thomas Pynchon...

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.