[In the following review, McGee praises Accordion Crimes, calling the work a “mighty, searing reflection on U.S. ethnic history.”]

Ours is a billboard culture. Giant signs may no longer line every highway, but we still like our labels writ large, especially when it comes to people. American advertisements for the self identify as well as pigeonhole in the ostensibly democratic, egalitarian society dreamt up by a bunch of Europeans fleeing tyranny, hierarchies and silly dress codes. Well, dream on. Take the accordion. Put that in American hands and they might as well be waving a sign that the snobbish will read as “Low Rent,” “Low Life,” “Lower Middle Class.”

E. Annie Proulx's new novel, Accordion Crimes, is a lyrically butt-kicking antidote to the assumption (mine, too) that the accordion's only crime is that it was ever invented in the first place, and a mighty, searing reflection on U.S. ethnic history. Edward Albee's drawing-room tragedy A Delicate Balance, on Broadway, and the current art-house hit Fargo both use accordions as condescending sight gags. But Proulx's novel makes it feel as though the accordion is using her: to tell the story of U.S. immigration through music, to write fiction that sheds new light on historical facts and to make up for the reams of contemporary novels that try to act cool about the alleged lower depths—trailer-park toughies, sordid Hispanics, mall-crawlers and polyester trash—while really only slumming. Her eccentric epic starts out with the maker of a green-leather button accordion immigrating from Sicily to the tropical hell of turn-of-the-century New Orleans, and ends by a dusty roadside in the present-day South.

Proulx being Proulx—the good-naturedly knotty The Shipping News was her last book—she's done her homework, and therein lies not exclusively the book's charm. Like an overeager academic, Proulx prefaces her narrative with lengthy acknowledgements citing every person and institution she consulted in the course of admittedly prodigious and far-flung research (with puppy-doggish personal notes thrown in). It's a gesture appropriate for nonfiction—and distinctly unsuitable for storytelling, meta- or not. Although not as bad as the kind of “thank you”s increasingly employed by striving fiction writers, announcing their influential friendships and grant-getting abilities, it would seem to signal an earnest, plodding book, and Accordion Crimes is far from that. So skim this intrusion, and marvel instead at how Proulx's powers of imagination and writing transcend the exposed mechanics of information gathering, sentence by weirdly gorgeous sentence: “All along the wet sand lay the wooden shoes of drowned Dutchmen and from the woods a bear emerged, head up into the wind, lured by the smell of burning sugar.”

With Accordion Crimes Proulx manages the saga of an object, a road novel with a musical instrument as protagonist instead of Neal Cassady or Huck Finn. The accordion journeys through time, place and human event: the bicycle-borne settlement of a German-speaking Iowa town, migratory “Frenchies” roving from bayou Louisiana to Canada's indistinct border with Maine, black and bluesy Chicago entering the Depression, Poles rolling pirogi and cigars, Basques sheepherding in Montana, downtrodden Mexicans living in a Southwest wrested from their ancestors. The travelogue offers a wonderful sort of “Proulx's Believe It or Not.” Myth is spun out of the mundane—thumbnail histories of linoleum and of Jules Verne's Polish origins, a disquisition on the Acadian name Courtemanche, riffs on long-defunct record companies, evocations of posthumous photography sessions, a critique of nouveau riche ranch decor, or the appearance of a black-painted funeral accordion.

Drenched in music and its lore, the novel draws similarities between making music and writing fiction, with Proulx's tale accruing rhythms and refrains of its own. Often that means skipping into the future, where incidents resemble The Shipping News's zany crudeness more than the sobering poetry of the rest of Accordion Crimes. It also sways from Old World to New, with the baggage of superstition, custom, folk magic and the ancient rituals of prejudice transported to an unknown and frightening land. There hope turns to disillusion, dreams to nightmares, authenticity to artifice (“aprons trimmed with bands of … Mamie Eisenhower pink,” “terrible cookbooks … by made-up women with American names, Betty Crocker, Mary Lee Taylor”) in Proulx's unflinching rendition of the dark side of the immigrant experience, her rewriting of American literature's upbeat Westward-ho classics.

Not that her lovable, unsavory characters don't achieve happiness, don't through music reach “the single burning night that comes at the top of a life.” It's just that “it's all downhill from there,” and the trick to avoiding the inevitable replacement of joy with sadness is to take a suicidal way out. For Proulx herself, perhaps the deepest sorrow stems from one of music's great ironies: that an instrument and its sounds can be shared by practically all cultures yet keep them apart. It's like religion: Faith is universal, but its institutional manifestations have forever caused killing, strife and discrimination. One man's music is another's “coon,” “Polack” or “potato-eater” junk. Billie Holiday sang of “strange fruit”; in Accordion Crimes, it's also “dago” Italians who get lynched. Before long, anti-German sentiment in World War I taints Schubert and angers German-Americans into “Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles,” stupid ethnic quarrels prefigure today's Balkans, an accordion antagonizes a murderous junta in Argentina, and Freemen-clones surface in Montana. The power of music indeed.

Adding macho insult to ethnic injury, most of Proulx's squeeze-box players are men, who jealously guard the accordion as a “man's instrument,” cruelly, sometimes violently, inciting daughters and wives to permanent flight. The men are in love with an instrument whose sexual connotations Proulx robustly explores, but that finally leaves them lonely and dissatisfied. Celebrity is ruined by hubris, illusions of grandeur are dashed the next step up the social ladder, heritage is rejected by succeeding generations. Meanwhile, the green accordion's secret gift, squirreled away early in the book, will go to a woman who knows what to do with human kindness. In Proulx's hands, such knowledge becomes a worthy substitute for the artisthood bestowed on accordion players of old, then battered beyond repair by the modern world. Proulx the artist always conveys the wonder left in even these diminished times. She hasn't given up on life, or art.