FICTION: That Old Ace In The Hole.By Annie Proulx.4th Estate, 359pp. £17.99
Readers of Annie Proulx will have figured out by now that sentimentality forms no part of her artistic lexicon. That said, exactly why her publishers decided to package her latest book, and fourth novel, in quite so ugly a jacket may be one of those jokes you either get, or don't. I didn't - and I was born in cowboy country.
A similar grotesque, deliberately distorted but raw quality is frequently apparent in her writing. Proulx has increasingly permitted what was initially the natural toughness, indeed harshness, of her blatantly physical, abrupt, rather cryptic prose style, to falter into crudely laboured tough-for-tough's sake. Her gunslinger archness can appear forced. As for some of the knee-slapping, down-home gags, well just don't expect subtlety.
Although her raw and convincingly powerful first novel, Postcards (1991), remains her best to date, it must be said Proulx is at heart a short story writer, as was evident as long ago as her first collection, Heart Songs (1986). Aside from Postcards, and despite the success of The Shipping News (1993) her finest writing is contained within those first stories as well as in her major achievement, the magnificent Brokeback Mountain.
That story was first published in the New Yorker in 1997 and then, shrewdly, published solo in book form, all 57 pages of it, in Britain in 1998, some months prior to the collection Close Range: Wyoming Stories (1999), of which it is the soul. So good is Brokeback Mountain, a love story of unbearable, almost eloquently inarticulate sadness that it excuses Proulx the failure of Accordion Crimes (1996), a flabby novel worth looking at only for what it reveals about the author's narrative and stylistic lapses.
As a prose writer who forces language to the limits, she invariably courts failure yet can also soar like an eagle. Well, there isn't much soaring, linguistic or otherwise, in That Old Ace In The Hole. Yet again she confirms that characterisation, for her, is mainly about human caricatures with faces life and multiple errors have driven over once too often.
No one invents, or rather dares invent, personal names and place names quite as calculatedly wacky as Proulx. Who else but Proulx would affix a name such as Babe Vanderslice to a minor character, as she does in the new novel? The local sheriff, a 40-year-old bed-wetter, obsessive nail-biter and life-long sexual partner of his kid sister, answers to the name Hugh Dough is one of the most realistic, and smartest.
La Von Fronk, who, "small and thin as a fifth grader, was a middle-aged ranch widow who resembled one of the minor Roman emperors with her intense, nervous face, small mouth barely wider than her nose, the eyes close-set under a ledgey brow, marbled hair of faded red and white", hires out her bunk house and proves a walking reference book of local and Texan social history. The slim to slight narrative is set largely in Woolybucket, an imagined two-horse town somewhere in the Texas panhandle, while another key location is a place called Cowboy Rose.
Just as we had the Gammy Bird, a local weekly newspaper in The Shipping News, an essential theatre for some of the action in the new book is part-time cowboy, part-time cook Cy Frease's Old Dog Café. But this is significant. Her new novel is the closest she has been to a return to The Shipping News.
However the prose is less ragged and the speech slightly less surreal than what passed for conversation in the determinedly unattractive, remote Newfoundland fishing outpost of the earlier novel. Also, in naively scheming Bob Dollar, aspiring but-soon- to- become-desperate hog farm site scout, Proulx has created the closest she has come to a soul mate for Quoyle, the likeable no-hoper of The Shipping News.
Young Dollar - cue gags such as "Mr Dime" or "Mr Nickel" is harmless enough and almost embarrassed by the deception he clumsily perpetrates on a bunch of locals who may not sound too smart, yet are far from stupid. The plot could be summed up in a sentence. Young feller shows up in a small town trying to con someone, anyone, into selling their ranch or small holding to his employer, the dastardly Global Pork Rind for yet another brutal hog farm. In such a place a pig is referred to as "a pork unit", production methods are brutal, the smell could ruin your life and the ethos is repugnant to any Texan with a love of the wide open spaces.
Dollar's mission has no chance. But he sticks in there, spinning yarns about scouting for properties suitable for building luxury homes. Lucky for him, the locals are talkative, while his landlady, La Von, the local historian of sorts, has a flair for marathon conversations. Through good old La Von we discover "customs of the country" such as "tipping over outhouses while someone was inside, killing snakes, saying "rabbit, rabbit, rabbit" before bed on the last night of the month, spying on neighbours". Just when it seems that Proulx, having done her cowboy bit in Wyoming, has just carried her research notebooks, sundry information about farming machinery and barbed wire fencing down South, the novel becomes less irritating and more entertaining. Sure, the trademark heavily vernacular speech - read "awl" for oil - with its endless sentences, convoluted gossip and genealogies can be overpowering, but the carry on, Dollar's lies, his bullying boss, the relentless local colour eventually take over and you may find yourself smiling.
It's a bit daft and at times heavy handed - "Near the path Bob noticed the grave of Mrs Venus Hogg, whose headstone was carved with the image of a Princess telephone and the somewhat sinister inscription, "Jesus called . . ." - reading Proulx aloud would require the lung capacity of a bellows, yet it is amusing. More than that though, regardless of the typical Proulx wads of Reader's Digest know-it- all information, it is US social history, shrewdly written about a particular region, where Texas and Oklahoma at times almost merge, that Americans, never mind the rest of the world, don't know much about. Aside from fairly obvious observations such as "He wondered if it was too late to become a cowboy and felt it was, at least a hundred years too late" there is a sense of a closed world where time passes more slowly.
Except for the fact that most of the characters, with their weathered cartoon faces, appear ancient - they cackle and wheeze, and most of the speakers possess long memories and even longer histories - it is as if time is something that exists elsewhere. Susceptible as I am to exchanges such as: "Hey, Bob Dollar, want your eggs bright-eyed or dirty on both sides? And are you still lookin' for a place to rent?" "Dirty. And I sure am,", this goofy if barbed novel slowly sort-of won me over.
Far less dark than the Proulx of recent works, it is entertaining enough. It does reiterate that while not quite the major novelist she has been billed as, she is, at times, an original story teller, with an eye and an ear for the offbeat and the grotesque and little time for the ordinary.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
Eileen Battersby