SOURCE: Rood, Karen L. “Understanding Annie Proulx.” In Understanding Annie Proulx, pp. 1-15. University of South Carolina Press, 2001.

[In the following essay, Rood provides an overview of Proulx's life, career, body of work, critical reception, and the salient themes and narrative style of her fiction.]

Annie Proulx achieved renown as a fiction writer relatively late in life, when her first novel, Postcards (1992), earned her the 1993 PEN/Faulkner Award. More honors followed for her second novel, The Shipping News (1993), which won a National Book Award for Fiction, a Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize for Fiction, and an Irish Times International Fiction Prize in 1993, as well as the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1994. The novel became a best-seller, earning Proulx, at fifty-eight, a reputation as an important “new” fiction writer. Proulx, however, had been writing short fiction for magazines since the 1950s and had been supporting herself and her three sons as a writer of mostly nonfiction since the mid-1970s, polishing the distinctive prose style that eventually brought her acclaim. Though her first four works of fiction were published under the name E. Annie Proulx, she announced in 1997 that she would prefer to be known as Annie Proulx and would use that name on all future writings.

The daughter of George Napoleon Proulx and Lois “Nellie” Gill Proulx, Edna Annie Proulx was born in Norwich, Connecticut, on 22 August 1935, the eldest of five daughters. (Her last name is pronounced “pru.”) Her mother's family, the Gills, emigrated from the west of England to New England in 1635. Two years later, the Proulxs left France for Quebec. In the 1860s her father's grandparents immigrated to New England to find employment in the textile mills. Proulx's father also worked in that industry, eventually becoming a company vice president and traveling to South America and Russia as a textile expert.¹ Proulx credits her mother, an artist and amateur naturalist whose family had “a strong tradition of oral storytelling,” with teaching her “to see and appreciate the natural world, to develop an eye for detail, and to tell a story.”²

Because of George Proulx's job, the family moved frequently during her childhood, living in towns in Vermont, North Carolina, Maine, and Rhode Island. Annie Proulx attended a one-room school in Brookfield, Vermont, Black Mountain High School in North Carolina, and Deering High School in Portland, Maine, before enrolling at Colby College in Waterville, Maine, in the class of 1957.³

Before earning her degree, Proulx dropped out of Colby and married H. Ridgely Bullock Jr. in 1955. They were divorced in 1960, and their daughter, Sylvia Marion, was brought up by her father. Several years later Proulx married again. Two sons, Jonathan Edward and Gillis Crowell, were born of this marriage, which also ended in divorce. In 1963 Proulx returned to Vermont and went back to school. She earned a B.A. cum laude in history at the University of Vermont in Burlington in 1969. In that year she married James Hamilton Lang, who adopted her children from her second marriage. Lang is the father of Proulx's third son, Morgan Hamilton. This marriage also ended in divorce.⁴

After graduating from the University of Vermont, Proulx attended graduate school in history at Sir George Williams University (now Concordia University) in Montreal. She earned an M.A. in 1973 and then did doctoral work in Renaissance economic history, passing her oral examinations in 1975. As Proulx told an interviewer in 1999, during graduate school she was “attracted to the French Annales school, which pioneered minute examination of the lives of ordinary people through account books, wills, marriage and death records, farming and crafts techniques, the development of technologies.”⁵ Rejecting the narrow definition of history as a record of the political and military activities of so-called great men, these historians look at the evolution of everyday life in the context of larger social, economic, and even geological change.⁶ Proulx's statement that she is “keenly interested in situations of change, both personal and social”⁷ and her focus in her fiction on individuals living in periods of major social and economic upheaval demonstrate the extent to which her academic training has shaped the course of her career as a novelist.

Proulx had begun writing short stories for magazines before she entered Sir George Williams University. Each year she was in graduate school, from 1970 through 1974, Seventeen, which first published a story by Proulx in 1964, took one or two of her stories. These stories are written for a teenage audience and address subjects commonly found in such fiction—such as popularity, social values, and self-awareness. Yet some of the themes of Proulx's mature fiction are already apparent. Her first Seventeen story, “All the Pretty Little Horses” (June 1964), and her last, “The Yellow Box” (December 1974), both emphasize the value of understanding the past and preserving one's heritage. “All the Pretty Little Horses” also introduces the ecological concerns that run throughout Proulx's fiction for adults. “The Ugly Room” (August 1972) and “Yellow-Leaves” (April 1974) are about teenage girls growing up among the rural poor of New England, the focus of the adult short stories collected in Proulx's first book, Heart Songs and Other Stories (1988), and of her first novel, Postcards.

In 1975 Proulx decided against a career in teaching and dropped out of graduate school. Living with a friend in Canaan, Vermont, in the area of the state known as the Northeast Kingdom, Proulx found few employment opportunities in this rural area near the Canadian border and turned to freelance journalism to support herself and her three sons. For more than a decade she wrote articles on subjects including fishing, black flies, apples, cidermaking, canoeing, mountain lions, gardening, and cooking for magazines such as Gourmet, Horticulture, Gray's Sporting Journal, Blair and Ketchums, Outdoor Life, National Wildlife, Organic Gardening, and Country Journal. After a few years she was writing nonfiction on assignment for magazines and “scribbling away on short stories” when she had time.⁸ The majority of her fiction during this period was published in Gray's Sporting Journal, a magazine with high literary standards for the outdoor stories it publishes. In 1999 Proulx recalled the “intense camaraderie and shared literary excitement among the writers whose fiction appeared in Gray's.” Without this experience, she asserted, she “would probably never have tried to write fiction.”⁹

Proulx also wrote nonfiction books and pamphlets. In 1980 and 1981 she wrote pamphlets on making apple cider, growing grapes, making insulated window shutters, and practicing the art of barter for the Garden Way how-to series. She and a friend, Lew Nichols, wrote two full-length books, Sweet and Hard Cider: Making It, Using It, and Enjoying It (1980) for Garden Way and The Complete Dairy Foods Cookbook (1982) for Rodale Press. In 1983 she moved to Vershire, Vermont, where she founded and edited a small monthly newspaper, The Vershire Behind the Times (1984–1986).

Proulx subsequently wrote three more books for Rodale Press: The Gardener's Journal and Record Book (1983), Plan and Make Your Own Fences and Gates, Walkways, Walls, and Drives (1983), and The Fine Art of Salad Gardening (1985). She also wrote The Gourmet Gardener (1987) for Fawcett Columbine. She “made a very decent living writing books on rural affairs for hire for Rodale Press” along with the nonfiction articles and short stories she sold to magazines.¹⁰

Proulx dismisses her nonfiction books, which are now in demand among book collectors, as assignments for hire that she wrote to earn money. Like most how-to books and cookbooks they were not widely reviewed. Yet brief notices in periodicals such as Publishers Weekly, Booklist, and Library Journal praised their thoroughness and usefulness to the general reader, and Proulx won a Garden Writers of America Award in 1986.

For the student of Proulx's later fiction her nonfiction is interesting for the historical perspective that she often brings to her subjects. For example, the reader finds histories of cider and the dairy in the books she wrote with Nichols, and The Gardener's Journal and Record Book is illustrated with engravings from nineteenth-century garden books “because they instruct and inform us with a richness of detail sadly absent in our own gardening works.”¹¹Plan and Make Your Own Fences and Gates, Walkways, Walls, and Drives is particularly interesting for its histories of early American fences, stone walls, and brickmaking. It also includes an anecdote about late-twentieth-century articles in popular periodicals that mistakenly identify root cellars built in hillsides “by great-great-grandfather to store his turnips” as ancient Celtic or Phoenician structures. Similar examples of such “Modern ignorance”¹² appear in Postcards and “Electric Arrows,” a short story collected in Heart Songs and Other Stories.

Like Proulx's nonfiction, her fiction is based on extensive research, which has contributed to the wealth of detail that reviewers have often praised in her fictional style. Information about what people eat, how it is prepared, and how cooking has changed over time is threaded through her fiction, adding depth to characterization and supporting social commentary. Her fascination with this important aspect of everyday life is apparent in Proulx's nonfiction books and articles on food, including fascinating accounts such as “The Curious, the Bizarre, the Delectable, and the Impossible” (Gray's Sporting Journal, September 1978), in which Proulx and Nichols describe how many varieties of game birds were cooked and eaten from ancient times through the first half of the twentieth century, and “North Woods Provender” (Gourmet, November 1979), in which Proulx describes dishes that have been served in the lumber camps of northern New England, Quebec, and New Brunswick for two centuries and traces their roots to the cooking of French Canadians of Norman ancestry.

During the years in which she made a living from writing nonfiction, Proulx at first sold her short stories mainly to sporting and outdoor magazines, but in 1982 her fiction reached a national audience of general readers when Tom Jenks accepted “The Wer-Trout” for the June issue of Esquire. He accepted two additional stories for the magazine before taking a job with Charles Scribner's Sons and inviting Proulx to collect some of her short stories into a book.¹³

The result was Heart Songs and Other Stories, published in October 1988. The reviews were mostly the sort of brief comments typically accorded a collection of short fiction by a little-known author, but they were on the whole laudatory. The Publishers Weekly reviewer called Proulx “a writer to watch” (19 August 1988), while Kenneth Rosen, writing for the “In Short” column of the New York Times Book Review (29 January 1989) praised her “sometimes enigmatic, often lyrical images.”¹⁴

Proulx's contract with Scribner's included a novel. Thinking of herself as a short-story writer, Proulx was at first uncertain that she would be able to write a longer work of fiction, but once she started writing Postcards, she found the process easier than writing short fiction. A publisher's advance and grants from the Vermont Council on the Arts in 1989 and the Ucross Foundation in 1990 allowed her to devote herself to fiction writing for the first time in her life. She drove cross-country “several times to catch the unfolding of the landscape and translate it into the vanished landscape of the 1940s and '50s.”¹⁵ She wrote Postcards in 1990, during a six-week residency at the Ucross Foundation in Clearmont, Wyoming, in the foothills of the Big Horn Mountains. She found that she could write easily there and wrote her next two novels at the foundation as well.

Published in January 1992, Postcards met with positive reviews. Writing about three first novels in Chicago Tribune Books (12 January 1992), novelist Frederick Busch devoted more than an equally apportioned amount of space to Postcards, describing it as more like a fifth or sixth novel than a first attempt and calling Proulx a “richly talented writer.”¹⁶ In the New York Times Book Review (22 March 1992), David Bradley went even further than Busch in his praise, saying that Proulx had “come close” to achieving the impossible goal of writing the Great American Novel: that is, a novel epitomizing the American experience as a whole.¹⁷

Published in March 1993, Proulx's second novel, The Shipping News, is set in Newfoundland, which Proulx visited for the first time in the mid-1980s during a fishing trip with a friend.¹⁸ She later bought a house on the Great Northern Peninsula of the island and spends time there each year. By the time she completed The Shipping News with the help of a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1991 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1992, she had made nine trips to the island, “watching, observing, taking notes and listening.”¹⁹ Filled with closely observed details of Newfoundland life and language, The Shipping News won the enthusiastic praise of critics and became a best-seller. The novelist Sandra Scofield, writing in the Washington Post Book World (1 August 1993), described it as “a novel that reinvents the tale and gives us a hero for our times.”²⁰ In Chicago Tribune Books (29 March 1993) Stephen Jones called the novel “a lyric page turner,”²¹ and Howard Norman, writing for the New York Times Book Review, praised Proulx's “surreal humor and her zest for the strange foibles of humanity.”²² The most accessible of Proulx's novels, The Shipping News was also her most widely acclaimed, bringing her four major awards.

Proulx has recounted that she developed the idea for her next novel, Accordion Crimes, while she was still writing The Shipping News, as she “sat shaking and aching in the middle of the night in the hours after a bite by a Brown Recluse spider.” She used that experience in the third section of Accordion Crimes, which is set in Texas and is the only part of the original draft she included in the final version. At first her plan was for the entire story of an accordion passing from one immigrant group to another to be set in Texas, “a state with an extremely rich immigrant population,” but after she did not receive a hoped-for residency fellowship that would have allowed her to spend six months in Texas fitting her plotline into the landscape of the state, she had to rethink the book. The result was much more ambitious than her original plan: an attempt to define the entire American “immigrant experience and the individual and cultural costs of abandoning the past and reinventing oneself.”²³

With eight sets of characters spread over more than a century and a wide range of locations, the novel is more epic in scope and less tightly structured than Proulx's first two novels. Some critics were bothered by the bigger and looser structure, and the reviewer for the influential New York Times Book Review (23 June 1996) disliked the frequent depictions of violence in the novel. As Proulx commented in 1999, it is hard to take seriously criticism of the violence in the fiction. After all, “America is a violent, gun-handling country.” Adding that in most cases the violence suffered by her characters is “drawn from true accounts of public record,” she explained that her characters' “bitter deaths and misadventures … illustrate American violence which is real, deep and vast.”²⁴ Other reviewers, including the critics for the Washington Post Book World (16 June 1996) and Chicago Tribune Books (9 June 1996), praised Accordion Crimes, and John Sutherland wrote in the New Republic (7 October 1996), that while The Shipping News demonstrated that Proulx is “a good novelist,” Accordion Crimes revealed that she is “a great novelist.”²⁵

In 1995 Proulx moved to Wyoming, where she now makes her home, though she spends much of each year traveling. In Wyoming, she writes, “[t]he long sight-lines encourage clarity of vision, the roll of high plains and stony steeps satisfy some inner longings smothered by my native New England woods.”²⁶ The stories in her 1999 book, Close Range: Wyoming Stories, demonstrate the depth to which she has come to understand her new home and its history. The New York Times reviewer Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, who had mixed feelings about Accordion Crimes, admired the “wry poetry of loneliness and pain” in Proulx's Wyoming stories (12 May 1999) while Richard Eder, writing for the New York Times Book Review (23 May 1999), admired Proulx's “feeling for place and the shape into which it twists her characters.” John Skow wrote an enthusiastic appreciation of Proulx's language for Time (17 May 1999).²⁷

The overarching concern of Proulx's fiction is the way in which ordinary people conduct their lives in the face of social, economic, and ecological change. From Heart Songs and Other Stories, with its focus on the interactions of the rural poor and the city people who are gradually buying up their land, and Postcards, which depicts the decline of the small New England family farm in the period of accelerated urbanization that began during the Second World War, Proulx went on, in The Shipping News, to show how the intrusion of modernization and big government is gradually destroying a traditional way of life in Newfoundland. Taking on the American melting-pot mentality that expected immigrants to give up the cultures of their homelands in order to gain acceptance, Accordion Crimes covers roughly a century of American life, from the 1890s to the 1990s. It looks at the people left behind in the rush toward “modernity” and the American Dream of prosperity. In Close Range Proulx illustrates the plight of Wyoming ranchers succumbing to the same general forces of modernization and big government as the New England farmers and Newfoundland fisherman in her earlier fiction.

Ever since the publication of Postcards—a novel about a man who murders his fiancée and wastes his life on the run, simultaneously obsessed with guilt and self-justification—reviewers have compared Proulx's fiction to that of Frank Norris and Theodore Dreiser. Postcards has a thematic connection to Norris's McTeague (1898), in which the title character kills his wife, and Dreiser's An American Tragedy (1925), about a young man who kills his fiancée. Yet Proulx goes beyond the old-fashioned genetic and social determinism that lies at the heart of these novels. Though nature and nurture are factors in her characters' fates, she expresses a more complex view of the forces that influence their lives. “Geography, geology, climate weather, the deep past, immediate events, shape the characters and partly determine what happens to them,” she explained in 1999, “although the random event counts for much as it does in life,” and her characters “pick their way through the chaos of change.” The world of Proulx's fiction offers no certainty, for good or for ill. Yet regardless of the hardships her characters encounter, Proulx notes, they harbor “the images of an ideal and seemingly attainable world.” She reveals in her fiction “the historical skew between what people have hoped for and who they thought they were and what befell them.”²⁸

A closer antecedent of Proulx's fiction is the early fiction of John Dos Passos, with its focus on the ordinary, working-class American trying to cope in an increasingly urban and industrialized capitalist society during the first half of the twentieth century. The broad canvasses of Postcards and Accordion Crimes may be considered attempts to define the American experience for Proulx's generation in the same way that Dos Passos's U.S.A. trilogy (1930–1936) forced his contemporaries to take a critical look at the American Dream.

Proulx admires her characters' traditional lifestyles and is well know for weaving information about topics such as language, customs, food, and craftsmanship into her narratives. She has been widely recognized for her lyrical prose style, her ability to create strikingly original images to express stark, sometimes horrifying truths. She is also well known for her wry humor, which often lightens the mood of violent scenes and pessimistic observations on human nature. Though she doe not wholly dismiss the redemptive power of love or the possibility of selfless actions, she more often than not portrays human beings as motivated by selfish concerns, showing how insecurity and hurt tend to spawn not compassion but anger, hatred, prejudice, and violence.

Proulx's intermixture of the humorous with the horrific bears comparison to Flannery O'Connor's. Yet, for O'Connor, a devout Roman Catholic, her bizarre characters and frequent use of violence were part of an attempt to show her readers how far the modern world has strayed from true Christianity. She had fixed religious and moral standards against which to measure human actions. Because Proulx's world of shifting values has no such guideposts, it is a more frightening place than O'Connor's world. The most humorous and most grotesque caricatures in O'Connor's fiction are individuals who have unwittingly or willfully fallen away from God's Grace and become agents of the devil. According to Proulx, she created her characters “to carry a particular story.” She refuses to “give them their heads and ‘see where they go.’” Yet her characters are complex beings, and she adds that the “work of inventing a believable and fictionally ‘true’ person on paper is exhilarating, particularly as one knowingly skates near the thin ice of caricature.”²⁹ In their roles of carrying the plotline Proulx's characters sometimes become what may be called secular versions of O'Connor's grotesques. The most extreme of them become so obsessed with their emotional scars that they gradually turn into little more than personifications of single overwhelming emotions. Because they are more complex and their emotional deformities have different, and more varied, roots than those of O'Connor's apostates, Proulx's grotesques also have more varied fates. Some, including Quoyle in The Shipping News and Ottaline in “The Bunchgrass Edge of the World” (1998), who both feel like outsiders because of their huge bodies, become progressively less grotesque as they discover possibilities for human relationships. Others, such as Rivers in “The Wer-Trout” (1982), Hans Beutle in Accordion Crimes, and Car Scope in “The Governors of Wyoming” (1999), are seriocomic. The reader recognizes their self inflicted plights but is too amused by their folly to feel much sympathy. Hawkheel in “On the Antler” (1983), Mme Malefoot in Accordion Crimes, and Mero in “The Half-Skinned Steer” (1997) are among the characters who, more pathetic than funny, nonetheless elicit laughter at their single-minded obsessions. Some characters, including Dub Blood in Postcards and Howard Poplin and Ivar Gasmann in Accordion Crimes are less-than-admirable comic grotesques who experience undeserved successes, while purely pathetic grotesques, such as Vela Gasmann in Accordion Crimes, are doomed to unhappiness. Proulx's most grotesque character is the murderer Loyal Blood in Postcards who deserves his fate but still draws reader sympathy because of Proulx's ability to describe his complex feelings of anger, self-justification, and guilt.

Just as Proulx's characters can become exaggerated versions of real people, her plotlines are occasionally interrupted by excursions into magical realism, a technique in which a plausible narrative enters the realm of fantasy without establishing a clearly defined line between the possible and impossible. Though Proulx often gives the reader “realistic” explanations for bizarre happenings, sometimes she purposely leaves such puzzles unresolved.

Proulx rarely uses first-person narration. Only three of her collected stories—“Stone City” and “Electric Arrows” in Heart Songs and Other Stories and “A Lonely Coast” in Close Range: Wyoming Stories—are narrated from a first-person point of view. The rest of her collected stories and all three of her novels are narrated from third-person-limited perspectives that, particularly in the novels and sometimes in her longer stories, shift from character to character to present more than one point of view. Through this technique, complications in a plotline are usually revealed gradually. Though the time span of the novel or short story proceeds in a linear fashion, important events of the past, and further information about episodes that have occurred earlier in the novel, are revealed as they come to a character's mind, or as a character learns more about them. Thus, Proulx's stories tend to have a thematic, rather than chronological, order. Her third-person narrators often comment on the action, usually paraphrasing or summarizing a character's thoughts rather than interjecting an authorial viewpoint. Sometimes, however, Proulx's narrators do step out of character to offer an authorial perspective, and in Accordion Crimes she uses this point of view in a technique she calls the “flash-forward” to reveal what happens to a character outside the time frame of the novel.

Proulx's fiction may be seen as part of a late twentieth-century trend toward a new regionalism. While southern regional writing has always remained strong, in the early years of the century the sophisticated, dispassionate writings of the great modernists made the local-color stories of other regions—so popular at the end of the previous century—seem poorly crafted and overly sentimental. At the same time, as Americans became increasingly urban, critics began to dismiss such rural fiction as irrelevant and outmoded. By the 1980s, however, this trend seemed to be reversing, with critical praise, literary prizes, and best-seller status accorded not only to Proulx's novels but to other notable works such as Carolyn Chute's The Beans of Egypt, Maine (1985), set in rural New England; John Casey's Spartina (1989), set in coastal Rhode Island; and Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses (1992), the first volume of this trilogy set on both sides of the U.S.-Mexican border. Like Proulx, these writers have learned not only from the modernists, but also from the magical realists and the minimalists—writers such as Raymond Carver and Ann Beattie, who trace their understated style to Ernest Hemingway—embracing some lessons while rejecting others. Readers who approach the works of these new regionalists out of a turn-of-the-century nostalgia for getting back to their country roots quickly have their notions of pastoral serenity replaced by pictures of rural poverty and varying degrees of violence. Proulx is the most ambitious of these writers, not only in her broad focus on more than one region but also in her attempt to explore the underlying causes of the social ills she depicts. As she told the Missouri Review interviewer in 1999, “The novel should take us, as readers, to a vantage point from which we can confront our human condition” and “see ourselves as living entities in the jammed and complex contemporary world.”³⁰

Notes

1. Letter from Proulx to Bruccoli Clark Layman, Inc., 11 November 1996.

2. Proulx, biographical statement in Reading Group Guide: The Shipping News (New York: Scribner, n.d. [1996]).

3. Ibid.; “E(dna) Annie Proulx,” in Contemporary Authors Online (Gale Group, 1999), accessed online 25 May 1999 galenet.gale.com; Colby College Bookstore—Alumni Books, accessed online 25 May 1999 www.colby.edu.bookstore/grads/50s/50s.html; “Proulx, E. Annie,” in Current Biography Yearbook 1995, ed. Judith Graham (New York: H. W. Wilson, 1995), 481.

4. Letter from Proulx to Bruccoli Clark Layman, Inc., 11 November 1996.

5. “An Interview with Annie Proulx,” Missouri Review 22, no. 2 (1999): 80.

6. Catharine Savage Brosman, “Les Annales d'Histoire Economique et Sociale,” in Dictionary of Twentieth Century Culture: French Culture, 1900–1975, ed. Brosman (Detroit: Gale, 1995), 9–10.

7. Proulx, biographical statement in Reading Group Guide: The Shipping News.

8. Letter from Proulx to Bruccoli Clark Layman, Inc., 11 November 1996.

9. “An Interview with Annie Proulx,” 80.

10. Letter from Proulx to Bruccoli Clark Layman, Inc., 11 November 1996.

11. Proulx, The Gardener's Journal and Record Book (Emmaus, Pa.: Rodale Press, 1983), 1.

12. Proulx, Plan and Make Your Own Fences and Gates, Walkways, Walls, and Drives (Emmaus, Pa.: Rodale Press, 1983), 83.

13. Sybil Steinberg, “E. Annie Proulx: An American Odyssey,” Publishers Weekly 243 (3 June 1996): 58.

14. Review of Heart Songs and Other Stories, Publishers Weekly 234 (19 August 1988): 60; Kenneth Rosen, review of Heart Songs and Other Stories, New York Times Book Review, 29 January 1989, 30.

15. Letter from Proulx to Bruccoli Clark Layman, Inc., 11 November 1996.

16. Frederick Busch, “A Desperate Perceptiveness,” Chicago Tribune Books, 12 January 1992, 1.

17. David Bradley, “A Family Running on Empty,” New York Times Book Review, 22 March 1992, 7.

18. Letter from Proulx to Karen L. Rood, 21 July 1999.

19. Proulx, biographical statement in Reading Group Guide: The Shipping News.

20. Sandra Scofield, “Harbors Of the Heart,” Washington Post Book World, 1 August 1993, 5.

21. Stephen Jones, “On the Coast of Misery,” Chicago Tribune Books, 21 March 1993, 1, 9.

22. Howard Norman, “In Killick-Claw, Everybody Reads The Gammy Bird,” New York Times Book Review, 4 April 1993, 13.

23. Proulx, “A Note to Readers,” in Reading Group Guide: Accordion Crimes.

24. “An Interview with Annie Proulx,” 88.

25. John Sutherland, “The Long Journey,” New Republic 215 (7 October 1996): 44–45.

26. Proulx, “A Note to Readers,” in Reading Group Guide: Accordion Crimes.

27. Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, “Lechery and Loneliness in the Hazardous West,” New York Times, 12 May 1999, E8; Richard Eder, “Don't Fence Me In,” New York Times Book Review, 23 May 1999, 8; John Skow, “On Strange Ground,” Time 153 (17 May 1990): 88.

28. “An Interview with Annie Proulx,” 79–80.

29. Ibid., 83–84.

30. Ibid., 88.