Proulx, Annie - Introduction

Annie Proulx 1935-

(Full name Edna Annie Proulx; formerly published as E. Annie Proulx) American novelist and short story writer.

The following entry presents an overview of Proulx's career through 2001. For further information on her life and works, see CLC, Volume 81.

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INTRODUCTION

With the publication of her Pulitzer Prize-winning second novel, The Shipping News (1993), Proulx attracted critical acclaim for the literary refinement of her richly descriptive, tragicomic fiction. Her work blends elements of regionalism, magical realism, and an ambitious prose style to create intricate narratives focusing on the changing North American landscape. A short story writer and novelist, Proulx is best known for her technical dexterity, her striking language and use of idioms, her close attention to the details of daily life, and her mordant humor. Whether meticulously describing the construction of an accordion in Accordion Crimes (1996) or the desolate Wyoming outback in Close Range (1999), Proulx mixes a powerful lyrical style with vast, exacting knowledge about her subjects—gained by careful research and keen observation—to create engaging stories about human lives as they are shaped by their historical, economic, and ecological circumstances.

Biographical Information

Proulx was born in Norwich, Connecticut, on August 22, 1935, the eldest of five daughters in a family of French-Canadian descent. Her family moved frequently—contributing to her fascination with geography—and Proulx's interest in nature and storytelling were fostered by her mother, an artist. Proulx published her first short story, “All the Pretty Little Horses,” in Seventeen magazine in 1964. As an undergraduate, Proulx attended Colby College and the University of Vermont, where she graduated cum laude in 1969. She began work on her doctorate in history at Sir George Williams University (now Concordia University) in Montreal, Canada, eventually passing her oral exams, but never completing the degree. Proulx's academic interest in history and custom, particularly the way in which changing circumstances influence everyday life, remained constant, reemerging throughout her fictional works. Married and divorced three times, Proulx became a single parent to three sons, whom she supported through freelance writing while living in New England. During this time, she founded a newspaper, Behind the Times; co-authored a book about making cider and another about cooking with dairy foods; wrote a number of “how-to” books; and contributed numerous articles on topics such as cooking, gardening, and fishing to a variety of publications. She also wrote short stories, which appeared in Gray's Sporting Journal and Esquire. In 1988 Proulx made her literary debut with the publication of Heart Songs and Other Stories, which was generally well received. Following the publication of this collection, Proulx was given an advance to write a novel, and, with additional assistance from foundation grants, she wrote Postcards (1992), which received the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 1993, making Proulx the first woman ever to win this coveted award. Proulx went on to win the Pulitzer Prize in 1994 for The Shipping News, which also received the National Book Award and the Irish Times International Fiction Prize. The Shipping News was subsequently adapted into a screenplay for a film starring Kevin Spacey in 2001.

Major Works

Proulx's stories and novels are characterized, above all, by the author's concern for place. Proulx renders the details of stark, forbidding landscapes in a manner that makes them both palpable and metaphorically powerful. Her characters, typically eccentric and emotionally scarred, are often directly shaped by their setting, and Proulx's unsparing observations record the intimate details of their daily existence. Through her finely wrought settings and interactions, Proulx addresses such grand themes as hope and futility, love and loss, and yearning and raw violence. Heart Songs and Other Stories consists of nine stories set in backwoods communities in northern New England. Combining irony with a poetic, precise style, these stories present scenes of bitter antagonism—involving cruelty, betrayal, and revenge—worked out in the context of the natural world and against a changing rural landscape. Postcards is a lyrical study of conflicting human emotions, such as guilt, and the devastation that accompanies changes to the social and physical terrain, particularly those set in motion following World War II. Spanning roughly thirty years, the novel follows the struggling, worn-down Blood family of Vermont. The protagonist, Loyal Blood, kills his girlfriend and flees from his home, heading west. His postcards sent to family in Vermont, along with the postcards of several others, mark each chapter opening and give the book its title. The Shipping News follows Quoyle, a newspaperman and father of two, as he reconnects with the land of his ancestors in Killick-Claw, Newfoundland. Along with his aunt and his children, Quoyle reinhabits his old family home, abandoned for the past forty years, and comes face to face with the brutal geography of Newfoundland. As in her other stories, Proulx employs an omniscient third-person narrator, an approach that permits a high degree of authorial observation and detachment. Topics addressed in the novel include the maritime economy, boat-building, a local newspaper, and knots, which are used to symbolize physical, spiritual, and emotional quandaries. Both water and knots serve as allusive leitmotifs throughout the narrative. Knots and ropes are reflected in the character name “Quoyle,” reminiscent of the word coil, and each chapter is prefaced by different knot-tying instructions for mariners. Language is central again in Proulx's next novel, Accordion Crimes, a celebration of everyday rituals—playing music, preparing and eating food—set against the grim realities of immigrant life in the United States. Variously regarded as a series of vignettes, related novellas, and a picaresque narrative, Accordion Crimes follows the life of a green, handmade accordion from its beginnings in 1890 Sicily through a succession of owners of various ethnic backgrounds—German, Polish, Norwegian, French Canadian, Black Cajun, Basque, Mexican—over the period of a century. The eight stories that constitute the novel depict the dangers and conflicts of assimilation, the dissipation of cultural identity, and the inevitable horrors of life in a violent, prejudiced society—and are often punctuated by grave misfortune and gruesome disfigurement or death. Close Range, Proulx's second short story collection, consists of eleven narratives set in distant, rugged Wyoming, where again the landscape is rendered as a dominant force, and where those who inhabit this space experience loneliness, violence, and suffering. The characters in these stories are mainly feckless, downtrodden ranchers and cowboys whose lives, while seemingly plain, are shaped in surprising ways by the physical world. In “Brokeback Mountain,” one of the most notable stories in the collection, Proulx relates the painfully sublimated homosexual bond between two male ranchers.

Critical Reception

While Proulx has sometimes been regarded as a relative newcomer to the literary scene, publishing her first book of fiction in her mid-fifties, critics have noted that she had been writing for more than two decades before her first collection was released, a fact that accounts for the technical prowess and precision of her work. Her fiction has been compared to that of Herman Melville, Cormac McCarthy, and the Southern gothic writings of William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor. Heart Songs and Other Stories initially received scant critical attention, but when it was republished in 1994, it was met with widespread critical acclaim. Reviewers have praised Postcards for its technical skill, stunning language, and breadth of vision. The Shipping News, alternately regarded as a black comedy, a romantic comedy, and a pastoral, has been Proulx's most critically and commercially well received work to date. Despite the novel's enormous popularity, some critics have found Proulx's language distracting and overdone, while others have felt that the author's detached approach kept the characters, particularly Quoyle, at an excessive remove. Accordion Crimes has been generally recognized as an ambitious and playful rendering of idiomatic language and American immigrant life. However, some reviewers have expressed disdain for the novel's structural device of tracking the accordion's peregrinations. Moreover, some critics have raised questions about the ubiquity of sudden violence in this and other of Proulx's works. A number of commentators have viewed it as a gratuitous plot device, while others suggest that the omnipresence of violence and perversity in Proulx's fiction reflects an underlying nihilism in the author. Close Range has been considered by several critics as Proulx's finest writing to date, though a few have noted that her overly descriptive passages occasionally hinder the pace of the stories. Yet, as with her previous fiction, reviewers have praised Proulx's salvific humor and moving depiction of the suffering and violence that define the grim lives of her characters. One of the stories from Close Range, “The Half-Skinned Deer,” was selected by John Updike to be included in the collection The Best American Short Stories of the Century.