An idea-novel is not a novel of ideas; it’s not even necessarily a novel. An idea-novel is the novel as conceptual art, the novel in which an idea the author has for structuring a book becomes the only meaning in the book, triumphing over theme, development, and even plot. In recent years, ideanovels have sprouted up like weeds — weeds that readers need to root out of contemporary fiction. And since E. Annie Proulx — winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Postcards (1992) and both the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize for The Shipping News (1993) — is America’s most highly decorated practitioner of the ideanovel, readers need to root her out as well.
It is unfair, of course, to blame Proulx for all the triumph of structure in modern literature. She writes well, in her fashion — if not like an angel, then at least like a magpie: She’s never seen a bright, shiny word without swooping down to pick it up. Her novels are full of the curious terms she’s collected, especially the hard-burnished technical language people who work with their hands invent: carpenters, gunsmiths, instrumentmakers, and boat- builders. No tiction writer since Kipling has been as enchanted with the specialized jargon of artisans and engineers.
And beside her widely admired ability to turn a sentence, there is also the fact that Proulx’s devices for structuring her novels are not the worst to which readers have been subjected. Following an Italian-made accordion across 20th-century America, abandoning each of its owners as soon as the accordion moves on, her latest work, Accordion Crimes (Scribner, 381 pages, $ 25), proposes a potentially pregnant symbol for the novel’s sour view of history: Squeezing together innumerable ethnic groups until they blow apart, America nonetheless manages like the accordion to make a wheezy, tacky kind of music. If her ideanovels lack the sly humor of Georges Perec (who once wrote an entire book without the letter “e”), she has at least avoided the excesses of someone like Richard Kostelanetz (who produced one work consisting of nothing but numerals, and another of a thousand carefully numbered blank pages).
But it’s not enough. Despite her prose style and her sense that structuring devices ought to have some symbolic heft, the fact remains that Proulx’s books are lacking something that makes for a great novel — maybe the very thing that makes for a novel in the first place.
Born in 1935, Proulx came late to fiction. After an early marriage and some graduate study in history during the 1960s, she found herself alone with three sons to support and began free-lance writing on architecture, cooking, the country life of her rural Vermont — anything for money. Along the way she wrote some short stories that interested an editor at Scribner, which brought out a collection in 1988, Heartsongs and Other Stories.
As Proulx recounts it, her contract for a story collection included a rider for a novel, and so in 1992 she published Postcards, hailed by the New York Times as close to being the great American novel. Opening at the climax of a sexual killing, the book tells in bits and pieces the story of a New England murderer, Loyal Blood, in his guiltridden roamings through the present-day American West. The novel is interesting in its flash pictures of the cow-punching, prospecting, and fur-trapping life still possible for the handful of lost souls who wander the Rockies and the high western plateaus. (As far as I’ve been able to discover, none of the novel’s reviewers remarked its possible reliance on the real-life travels of Claude Dallas, the mountainman who gunned down a fish and game warden in the early 1980s.) Developing in coherent though fragmentary form its genuine plot and theme, Postcards is not exactly an idea-novel. Its critical success, however, taught Proulx a dangerous lesson — for she structured the book with an idea- novel sort of device, each chapter beginning with the reproduction of a postcard from one of the characters to another.
The next year, with her second novel, Proulx deepened her dependence on structural ideas. The Shipping News still contains an actual if underdeveloped story about a slack and unlucky man named Quoyle who finds sanctuary for himself and his disturbed daughters with a whimsical aunt in Newfoundland. Reporting for the island’s newspaper (the Shipping News of the novel’s title), Quoyle gradually draws from the eccentricities and sea- rhythms in the lives of the locals he is sent out to interview some of the strength and maturity he had always lacked. But the author imprisons her story in a cage of structural devices. Each of the short chapters begins with a quotation (mostly from a book describing how to tie various knots) which the following pages are supposed to instantiate metaphorically in the lives of the novel’s characters. Proulx is smart, with a gift, more typical of a poet than a novelist, for making the ordinary activity of things work as metaphors and figures for human emotion. But too much of her intelligence and gift in The Shipping News is spent in crossword-puzzle, brain-teaser sorts of diversions, inventing newspaper stories, quotations, and a whole ” knot-philosophy” for life and love.
With Accordion Crimes, she succumbs completely to structure, publishing an idea for a novel without much in the way of an accompanying novel. There was in her first two books a deep sentimentality, an emotional and even mawkish vision of human happiness. One of the reasons for Proulx’s obscuring of her stories in a cloud of clever inventions may be a desire to hide her sappy side from her readers and even, perhaps, from herself. “If a bird with a broken neck could fly away, what else might be possible?” she concludes The Shipping News; “It may happen that a crab is caught with the shadow of a hand on its back, that the wind be imprisoned in a bit of knotted string. And it may be that love sometimes occurs without pain or misery.” The last sentence of Postcards is a dying man’s vision: “Through waves of darkening he sees the wind streaming down the slope of land, rolling down the grass, the red awns combing the sunlight, flashing needle stems, the close- stitched earth, the root, the rock.”
But that fault of sentimentality, if fault it is, is completely gone in Accordion Crimes. This is a grim book in which everyone dies, and dies ugly. The Italian immigrant who made the accordion is lynched by a nativist mob in New Orleans, his body hung out for his son to see. The black man who steals the instrument is knifed in his sleep. Characters are variously pistoled, parboiled in hot springs, shot with arrows while urinating behind a tree, poisoned to death with spider venom, and done in by testicular gangrene from a botched implant of goat glands. One man commits an unlikely suicide by cutting off his head with a chainsaw, while another hangs himself in the cab of his truck, leaving a note that reads, “I’m not going to wear glasses.” Near the end of the novel a little girl, reaching up with a broom to chase away some birds, has her arms sliced off by a sheet of metal blown off a truck driving by on the highway.
Insofar as Accordion Crimes has a theme, it is a fairly silly notion of American history as the murderous enacting of the violence and hatred that the novel claims is the American soul. (Proulx takes as her epigraph an overheated line from Cornel West, in which racial tension is declared the universal condition of the United States: “Without the presence of black people in America, European-Americans would not be ‘white’ — they would be only Irish, Italians, Poles, Welsh, and others engaged in class, ethnic, and gender struggles over resources and identity.”) But the violence in the novel is finally all too much, too random and too unrelated to her exaggerated theme. The accordion is more a curse than a symbol, as it moves from nasty vignette to nasty vignette, doomed owner to doomed owner.
It is certainly true (as Henry James once claimed, while protesting weaknesses in Anthony Trol1ope’s novel The Belton Estate) that the function of any book is to suggest thought. The function of the particular books we call novels, however, is to suggest a certain kind of a thought about the way human life is shaped into stories. Polished prose is not enough, and neither is an interesting idea for structure. They may not even be necessary: There have been plenty of good novels (like Theodore Dreiser’s 1925 An American Tragedy or nearly anything by James Fenimore Cooper) filled with rotten prose, just as there have been several great novels (like Don Quixote or Martin Chuzzlewit) that can barely be said to have a structure at all. But there’s never been a genuine novel that didn’t at least try to tell a story.
The idea-novelists, however, don’t like to deal in messy, complicated things like stories. They want the novel to be a sculpture, a crossword puzzle, or an essay: anything they think they can make hard and clean and conceptual. Perhaps because novels have been for almost two hundred years a principal means by which writers in English have tried to present explanations of human life, the idea-novelists imagine that by mastering their writing with structural ideas, they will also manage to master life. But they succeed only in killing their books. If the novelist E. Annie Proulx, with her fine prose and her smart ideas, wants to start writing novels, she’s going to have to surrender to the messiness and complication of human life and begin her books not with an idea for a structure, but with an idea for a story.
By J. Bottum
