Wise women in wikuoms

In spurts and bursts and flashes, a sublime novelist at work reveals herself. In Annie Proulx’s new novel, there are breath-taking pages and set pieces of extraordinary power. A man on board a ship, as the temperature plummets, sees all those around him embedded in ice before the catastrophe falls on him; a logging run down a river blocks, builds and explodes with the force of missiles; a wall of fire sweeps across a forested wildness. There are individual chapters of great dramatic force, as Proulx’s people confront the possibilities before them and produce their own solutions. But are those flashes enough? Barkskins in the end seems to me a work of profound error, in which a novelist’s conscious decisions have done a good deal to suppress what that novelist  can do best.

Proulx is an unpredictable writer, whose career has sometimes tested the patience of even the most sympathetic admirer. In my view, she has written two of the great American novels of the last 25 years, in The Shipping News and That Old Ace in the Hole. They are books primarily of place, where a dauntless spirit of inventive improvisation and passionate devotion to arcane detail rules over more ordinary virtues. But there is, too, a serious disappointment in Accordion Crimes, where, as in her promising first novel, Postcards, an arbitrary decision about the novelistic structure cramps her freedom. When she is good, as in her great short story ‘Brokeback Mountain’, it’s because her novelist’s eye follows a character into their world, not quite knowing what they will find there; when she fails, it is because she has decided that it would be interesting to fill a predetermined shape, like a model village, with suitable inhabitants.

Barkskins is a highly ambitious attempt to tell a story over hundreds of years.