Our feast of fabulous reviews this week includes Dwight Garner on Annie Proulx Stories, Clare Clark on Louise Kennedy’s Stations, John Semly on William Gass’s The Tunnel, Daniel Mason on Tom Drury’s West of Loveland, and Nick Holdstock on William T. Vollman’s A Table for Fortune. Brought to you by Book Marks, Lit Hub’s home for book reviews.
She’s a putter-inner, not a taker-outer. Like an outsider artist, she fills even the far margins of her canvases with bizarre stick figures and grim tableaux. There is no one like her.
She has a new, career-spanning collection of stories out now. Reading it is like opening the hall closet and having the contents of an antique junk shop, laced with spiky and rusted farm implements, spill out and maim your dog. It’s as if the characters have fallen out of, or into, Michael Lesy’s Wisconsin Death Trip, that catalog of woe.
But the inundation is purposeful and artful. From her chaotic style she coaxes out wild, wind-chapped poetries, as if she were the caller of a cosmic hoedown. Her crowded verbiage contains nested critiques of modernity, of every sort of streamlined ease.
A lot of her stories contain sideways glances at the new money coming into town, doctors buying up the old ranches and turning them into weekend homes with American-eagle door knockers. Nothing in Proulxland is pasteurized for your protection. Her densities put you in mind of all the great, clanking accumulators: James Joyce’s associations, stacked like pancakes; Gustav Klimt’s encrustations of paint; Charles Ives’s garage-sale polytonalities.
Stephen King once said that his stuff was the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and fries. If that’s true, then Proulx’s writing is the equivalent of a platter of gizzards, chicken feet and deviled kidneys.” –Dwight Garner on Annie Proulx Stories: New & Selected (The New York Times) “The novel traces the warp and weft of their relationship over the next 25 years. Structured like a sporadically kept diary, clusters of dated entries disrupted by long gaps, it has echoes of David Nicholls’s One Day; but Kennedy’s London is altogether grimmer and more brutal, a city of squats and gas heaters and not enough change for the payphone.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
