A cast of thousands come to America

A cast of thousands, and the various misadventures of a two row button accordion, feature in multi prize winning author E. Annie Proulx's heavily ironic new novel, Accordion Crimes (4th Estate, £16.99 in UK), an ambitious attempt to chronicle a large part of American history. It is the story of emigration and the people who left Europe for a new, in many eases worse, life. "This filthy America is fraud and deceit," says a character, in despair from his prison cell, "my fortune is lost. America is a place of lies and bitter disappointment. It promises everything but eats you alive. I shook the hand of John D. Rockefeller, yet it means nothing."

Proulx is a ruggedly singular stylist. Her rejection of the common place has become something of a literary campaign and in this, her third and disappointing novel, much of what has previously seemed inspirational now seems merely grotesque and ill developed. The prose is cryptic jagged and forced as are many of the descriptions. Some of the images do come alive, if only because of their gruesomeness. "A few nights later the accordion maker had a waking dream of raw meat, of the wet kid carcases he remembered from village butchering, of basins of red flesh with fat, of glistening bones with maroon shreds of tissue clinging to the joints, of dark gobbets dropped randomly on a great flight of stairs."

Never a sentimentalist, Proulx throughout this harsh, brutal, curiously impersonal book has opted for extremes a woman ranch hand, Eunice Brown, skin and bone and a mad preacher's face, two intense, glaring eyes and a mouth misshapen by the sear of a burn put on her by a slit-eyed cousin with a branding iron and has fallen into traps usually reserved for far lesser writers. Attempting to trace more than a hundred years of history has resulted in a relentless pursuit of chronology and obsessive detail, at the expense of character. The idea may be ingenious and Proulx certainly has researched her subject, but information does not create narrative, particularly when it is handled with such abandon.

As Proulx races from one set of caricatured characters and predictably bizarre situations to the next it is as if she is reluctant to engage with her material. And if the author is disdainful of involvement, what can possibly be expected of the reader?

Novels such as this are invariably, and wrongly, described as Dickensian. Dickens believed in and practised sustained story telling. More like a bloated, episodic morality play this novel too often degenerates into a quasi magic realist variation on the work of Hieronymus Bosch. For all the wealth of digression and asides there is little life in the hook. Few if any of the characters convince. Proulx fails to stay long enough with any of them. After holding centre stage for a page or two a character may have the rest of his or her life and death packaged into a bracketed paragraph. Death in Proulx's world is seldom normal a bride inhales a fatal shrimp while laughing at a joke a man celebrating his 5th wedding anniversary in Yellowstone National Park trips on a roll of film and falls into a seething hot spring "and despite eyes parboiled blind and the knowledge of impending death, clambered out leaving the skin of his hands like red gloves on the stony edge.

A sex crazed old German former, unable to accept impotence after a life of lust indulges in a sexually rejuvenating operation which results in his death from gangrene. Another, more minor, player gets as far as San Francisco "where he was struck dawn by a touring Cadillac with an electric self starter". A young husband is electrocuted when his electric worm probe strikes an extension cable. "For a moment, as he leaped into the air, he had the galvanising sensation that he was being turned inside out as a skin is stripped off a rabbit in one sharp jerk, but by the time he landed facedown in the sopping grass he was almost dead, and he was thoroughly dead, surrounded by a halo of electrocuted worms and robins, when his wife notices him from the kitchen four hours later." Strange deaths are matched by the odd names Proulx dreams up for her characters. The electrocuted worm hunter is called Hieronim. There is also a Onesiphore Malefoot and a Warfield Dunks.

Compared with some of the weird individuals, most of whom are miserable, unhappy and doomed, the little accordion may seem too ordinary an object to be a unifying device particularly in a narrative as randomly constructed as this. It was made by a Sicilian craftsman who with his son sails to America and disaster. Once she wearies of these two, Proulx shifts the story to another set of emigrants. The story rambles on, the accordion is passed baton like by a team of runners her east of Germans, Poles, Mexicans, Italians, Irish who appear indifferent to it.

Some hooks engage the emotions, some the intellect the best do both. Yet Accordion Crimes engages neither. In Postcards (1992), her first and finest novel to date, Jewell, the ageing wife of a Vermont farmer beaten by his land and his stock, defers to domestic rituals and also the demands of nature, if only in her garden. Late in life, she learns to drive and becomes "dizzy with power for the first time in her adult life". It is a moving portrait of a woman who has finally grasped some share of life, and a powerful, human moment in a superb novel. Accordion Crimes is sharp, clever and utterly devoid of heart. Few writers have promised more and few have delivered less than she has in a slick unconvincing compendium of data and empty gags.