E. Annie Proulx, or Annie Proulx as she is sometimes known, is one of America's best known and most successful authors. She is the author of the short story on which the movie "Broke Back Mountain" was based and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award for her novel "The Shipping News" in 1994. This is actually the third of her works which I have read and yet I have not yet written about any of them on this blog which is an unjustifiable error. At times, she is a wonderful writer and her prose can flow smoothly, interestingly, and in a manner which consistently draws the reader deeper into her works. But, in my opinion, at times her work falls measurably short of her best. I like this book as much or better than either of her others which I have read. But I have to admit that I enjoyed the earlier reads enough to go back for another dip in this one. Perhaps part of that higher level of pleasure on my part comes from the fact that, as a child in grade school in Knott County Kentucky, I was exposed on a monthly basis to live gospel accordion music from Alma Heibert, of the two "Bible Women" who were allowed to visit each small, rural grade school in the county on a monthly basis as a part of their missionary work with Camp Nathaniel in the county. As always when I mention my experience with these two women and that fact that missionaries were allowed to visit public schools in the county, I am morally and ethically bound to state that the fact that they were allowed to do so in public schools was a clear cut violation of the Separation of Church and State and never should have been allowed to happen. But, yes, I do have fond memories of having known those women and of accordion music.
The main character in this novel is not a person but an accordion, hand made by a native of an Italian native who emigrated to the United State with the instrument he had made and eventually sold it. The human characters come and go in the novel as the accordion passes from hand to hand, being used by members of different ethnicities to play the particular music of each culture as the instrument passes along its life. The accordion is variously owned and played by Mexican Americans, African Americans, Polish Americans, Irish Americans, and other members of other cultures. Along the way during the story, Proulx weaves in a great deal of historical and musical information about accordions, their instrumental relatives, and many of the cultures which are historically connected to accordion music. along the way, the instrument is loved, played, admired, and sometimes abandoned much as a human character might have been. It is an interesting and unique method of constructing a novel and, I believe, is some of Proulx's best work. In my opinion, the language and written structure of the novel is more skillful than that in either "The Shipping News" or "That Old Ace In The Hole" both of which I have also read and will, perhaps, also write about on this blog. The accordion becomes a living, breathing character in the book. It is more than just a musical instrument. It is a delivery vehicle which deposits musical and cultural history at the reader's doorstep. It becomes the glue which brings all the other characters, cultures, and histories together. And those histories are both documentations of cultures and of people, families, and individual and shared lives. It is a book well worth reading, especially if the reader is not familiar with the work of Proulx it is a fine place to begin a relationship with the author and her work.
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