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
J. Rentilly is a Los Angeles–based
freelance writer.
Annie
Proulx’s
Barkskins
is an epic
undertaking
The Costco Connection
Barkskins is available now in all Costco warehouse locations.
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