True (As in Proulx) Grit Wins

By John Skow

For 19 years E. (for Edna) Annie Proulx, whose fine, rambunctious second novel The Shipping News won the National Book Award last week, supported herself by writing for small to middling outdoor magazines. This is very close to being impossible. The caloric content of the checks that drift in months late is only marginally greater than that of rejection slips burned in the wood stove.

Proulx (rhymes with true) is 58, a tough, rooted Vermonter. She dropped out of graduate school years ago and fetched up in a bare cabin in the northern end of the state. She and a friend fished, hunted and foraged to feed themselves. Living that way "makes you very alert and aware of everything around you, from tree branches and wild mushrooms to animal tracks," Proulx says. "It's excellent training for the eye. Most of us stagger around deaf and blind."

She was also teaching herself to write, in a way not now fashionable. "I believe if you get the landscape right," she says, "the characters will step out of it, and they'll be in the right place. The story will come from the landscape." The story also comes, deviously or directly, from knocking about through one's own life, and Proulx did her share of that. She married and divorced three times and has three grown sons. But she says that the autobiographical content of her fiction is "zero" and urges young novelists to ignore the customary preachment to write about what they know. "Write about what's interesting," she says. "Write about what you'd like to know."

To a degree that is close to obsession, she follows her own advice. Postcards, her first novel, is about rural America from World War II to the present, and research didn't take her far from home. But most of The Shipping News (Scribner's; 337 pages; $20) is set on the coast of Newfoundland. Proulx made seven trips there, learning the ways in which locals and newcomers use language, seeing how the tight community life falls apart in thin times, as the old occupations of cod fishing and seal hunting fail.

For a new, half-finished novel called Accordion Crimes, she has already scouted Texas, Chicago and most of New England, with Minnesota and Wisconsin still ahead. This rumbling about the continent might simply be pencil sharpening, the kind of elaborate preparation that writers allow themselves while waiting for mental mists to clear. But for Proulx it works.

What sets her well apart from the ruck of writers is the lash and sting of her language. She can summon ferocity without effort, can smilingly backhand reader or character into a tumbled heap. But she uses this violent gift in a curiously selective way. At the outset of The Shipping News, she demeans her hero, a blobby, unfocused man named Quoyle, as "a dog dressed in a man's suit for a comic photo," who possesses "a great damp loaf of a body." His faithless wife is "thin, moist, hot . . . in another time, another sex, she would have been a Genghis Khan." After they marry, her "desire reversed to detestation like a rubber glove turned inside out." But as Quoyle heads to Newfoundland and fumbles through life as a newspaperman, the author eases up and allows an occasional smile.

One of Proulx's early editors, Ed Gray, founder of Gray's Sporting Journal, has things almost exactly right in his analysis of her extreme characters and situations: "She shocks you with them at the beginning and then proceeds to have you ride with them through something you couldn't have imagined them going through, or you going through as a reader, until at the end there is some sort of state of grace that's achieved."

Gray thinks that Proulx's highest gift is for comedy, and he may be right. Or it may be that the darker early stories (collected as Heart Songs) and Postcards are simply too rough to be read comfortably. But The Shipping News is funnier and kindlier than Proulx's other work -- not precisely light in tone, the author says wryly, but "light blue." Though the commotion of being abruptly famous feels "like I've backed into some bizarre machinery," her professional life is blissful now. This is not so much due to the shelfful of literary prizes she has collected this year (the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Heartland and the Irish Times International Fiction Prize, as well as last week's honor) as to the fact that she doesn't have to write any more short stories. "I had a terrible time writing them," she says. "Editors always complained -- 'You put too much in; you have too many characters who are always taking these side trips.' "

With novels, side trips are okay. "A novel for me was a wonderful feeling. It was like getting into a warm bath and being able to spread out and loll around in these lovely paragraphs and pages of description." Fair warning: a warm, lolling author does not mean that readers and characters will escape Proulx's lash. She assesses the tone of her Accordion Crimes as "black and scarlet."

With reporting by Georgia Harbison/New York