The Costco Connection

JUNE 2016 ;e Costco Connection 75 arts & entertainment

By J. Rentilly

ANNIE PROULX IS, like the tree once described by Little Prince author Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, “a slow, enduring force, straining to win the sky.” Though Proulx is, self-admittedly, an object in perennial motion, there is nothing improvident about her creative process, her artful surveillance of the Gordian knots humans unflaggingly cinch or the peerless prose she has summoned consistently since her debut collection, Heart Songs and Other Stories, was published nearly 30 years ago.

With Barkskins, Proulx (now age 80) has delivered her magnum opus, a literary force majeure. Spanning more than 300 years, the book begins with two Frenchmen, René Sel and Charles Duquet, who arrive in New France (now Canada) in 1693 to work for a local seigneur in exchange for land. The subsequent sections alternate between each man’s bloodline, tracing displacement, resettlement and death, and finishing in 2013.

The centuries-spanning novel extends Proulx’s marriage of geography and tribulation, roiling with the treachery, holocaust and barbarous entanglements of rapacious pioneers then and now, and turning suddenly meditative as the woodcutters come to understand that razing the enchanted forests of their youths has resulted in a life sentence of emptiness.

Proulx’s third novel, 1996’s Accordion Crimes, bewitched Pulitzer Prize–winning

Washington Post book columnist Michael Dirda. “A young writer may be accomplished, witty, or technically innovative,” Dirda wrote of Proulx, then 61. “But no kid can ever match a middle-aged novelist for insight into everyone’s favorite tragicomedy: the ravages of time and fate.” Twenty years on, Dirda believes his initial appraisal of Proulx has become irrefutable. “All of the things I wrote about the writer who wrote Accordion Crimes are even more true of an even older Proulx a quarter century later with Barkskins,” he tells The Connection.

Barkskins is a novel
Proulx was born to write
and has been writing, in
one way or another, for
nearly half her life. The novel first germi-
nated 30 years ago in Michigan’s Upper
Peninsula, then was fed mindfully through
the years with research jaunts from Proulx’s
beloved spiritual headquarters in Wyoming
to the wooded wonderlands of the Pacific
Northwest and the plush coppices of New
Zealand. Proulx also devoured countless vol-
umes on such esoterica as Indonesian log
poaching, Mi’kmaw anthropology, pre-Colo-
nial colloquialisms and English timber rights.

In the interim, she published four novels and four collections of stories, earning a Pulitzer, a National Book Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship and a PEN/Faulkner Award for her efforts. Though Proulx published a short memoir of her life in Wyoming a few years ago and composed the libretto for a 2014 opera of Brokeback Mountain, based on her eponymous short story, it’s been 14 years since her last novel.

Proulx wishes Barkskins could have bloomed sooner, but epic novels require epic research, and she was also recently waylaid with four moves—“difficult ones,” she says—in as many years. Ultimately, it was her steadfast nature—“scribbling scenes on the back of a paper bag in a grocery store,” plowing through “so many drafts,” writing the novel on her feet, standing at “an old, slant-top Wells Fargo stagecoach station desk” in her large, high-ceilinged home office—that saw her through.

“I am something of a single-minded and dogged person who likes to concentrate on the work in hand and see it through to the end,” she tells The Connection from her home in Washington state.

Those very characteristics are key to Proulx’s brilliance and also an immaculate reflection of the haunted, Old Testament

Wyoming hinterlands where she long lived and set countless stories, according to screenwriter Diana Ossana, who co-wrote the Oscar-winning film adaptation of Brokeback Mountain with novelist Larry McMurtry. “The place where Annie made her home for so many years, it’s majestic—but it’s also kind of overwhelming,” says Ossana. “Larry said it really well: ‘You see those magnificent Wyoming mountains and you think you’re looking at a love song, but really, you’re experiencing a death song.’ Not that anyone else could write like Annie Proulx, but I remember thinking: Surrounded by that particular wilderness, how could Annie Proulx not write like Annie Proulx?”

Which is to say, Annie Proulx has at last emerged from the chaparral, and the spoils of her scorched, coiling odyssey is Barkskins, a novel that howls, grieves, lilts and erupts with urgency, authority and something that looks a lot like hope. C