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.
