38
PARTISAN REVIEW
sexual difference. And it is true that some of the best novels written by
women in our time show the persistent importance to female writers and
readers of the condition of women and the trials of the female self - and,
above all, of the female
sense
of these matters.
Sieving out of the stream some latest books by women, I find that one
novelist who does not fear to draw upon the dominant traditions of male
literary expression is the extraordinary E. Annie Proulx, who began to
write fiction in 1992 when she was fifty-seven and has already won all the
prizes - PEN-Faulkner, National Book Award, and Pulitzer - for her two
previous books.
Accordion Crimes
is a sweeping epic, a
comedie humail1e,
crowded with characters, rich in description of social habitats, class and
group manners, varied speech patterns. It is also a virtuoso exploitation of
the tradition of the male "road novel" that takes as its hero a button accor–
dion which travels from hand to hand and connects in this fashion a rich
succession of separate tales. At each stop we are pI unged into the experi–
ence of two or more generations of American immigrants, following
chiefly the adventures of men, perhaps because Proulx feels that more than
women they have represented the extravagant expectations and the frus–
trations and recoveries of that "American Dream" which began as the
dream of those who arrive here from another place. Proulx's point of view
shifts from one vivid small novella to another. Her characters replace each
other as new Americans governed by their individual aspirations and prej–
udices and by the confronting circumstances, the physical and social
landscape of this country. What such a method loses by surrender of
attachment to the vibrations of a single personality, it makes up by
panoramic scope and zooms of startling close vision. Her pages are dense
with vivid particularities chosen with a cultural historian's sense of signi–
fication. Her style, though compacted with this detail, is energetic,
forward-moving, discovering in each sentence the next step of action. In
the place of submersion in her characters' consciousness she provides a sar–
donic poetry of Olympian insight.
Proulx's American newcomer is generally poor, and his dreams are
crushed by adversity and nativist prejudice or demeaned by paltry reali za–
tion. But his child or grandchild rejects his ethnic past - recognizes
himself "to be a poor, graceless, homely and uneducated Mick," or believes
that "Norwegians were a joke and their accent was a joke and they made
themselves into jokes with stupid behavior and low comedy acts and
songs." And sometimes, with this submission to assimilation, prosperity
arrives. There is a grim, naturalistic humor in the spectacle, and also in the
inexorable briskness of the novelist as she takes us on from one to anoth–
er "hyphenated" American with roots in Italy, Germany, Mexico, France,
Africa, Poland, Ireland, Norway, or the country of the Basques.
