Squeeze Play Proulx’ Novel Follows The Trail Of A Cursed Accordion And The Oppressed Lives And Odd Deaths Of Its Numerous Owners
“Accordion Crimes” E. Annie Proulx (Scribner, 381 pp., $25)
E. Annie Proulx’s latest novel may well tell a whole lot more than you really want to know about the structure of accordions, the short, nasty, brutish lives of American immigrants and the dark imagination of E. Annie herself.
Proulx (pronounced PRU) knocked the collective socks off the reading public - and the critics - with her funny and fanciful 1993 novel, “The Shipping News.” That modern-day fairy tale about a froggy guy who becomes a prince of sorts won boatloads of big awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
Around the newspaperman Quoyle - an unlikely hero, a shy, shambling giant with a soft heart - Proulx constructed a tightly woven story of love and self-discovery.
“Accordion Crimes” is radically different. Though it’s another fine showcase for Proulx’s verbal virtuosity and is packed to the gunwales with snippets of history, both American and musical, it lacks a central character for the reader to embrace. You will learn a lot from this book, but expect your socks to stay resolutely in place.
Though there is no one human character to follow, there is a humble, handmade button accordion that gets passed along, sometimes by design, sometimes by chance, to musicians of many different ethnicities.
Handcrafted of green leather with embellishments of brass, the lovely little instrument makes beautiful music. It also brings with it bad luck and a grotesque litany of deaths.
Proulx conjures up death by lynching, death by spider bites, death by a goat-gland operation that leads not to enhanced sexual potency but to gangrene of the testicles. And that’s just for starters. There are also deaths by cancer (perhaps induced by gargling horse liniment), death by rattlesnake bite and a particularly horrific suicide by chain saw - don’t ask.
Death comes to Italians, to Southern blacks, to Germans, to French-Canadians, to Cajuns, to Mexicans, to Poles, to Basques. All have owned the little green accordion.
They also all have traveled the hard path of the immigrant, facing down poverty, disease, squalor and discrimination as they fight to survive. Those who do make it pay the steep price of assimilation. They renounce their native languages, foreign-sounding names and oldworld music as they sand down their uniqueness, the better to squeeze themselves into the rigid confines of the middle class.
Proulx was rhapsodic in her descriptions of Newfoundland in “The Shipping News.” But she is not painting pretty pictures here. She is realistically depicting immigrant life from the turn of the century through World War II, as well as the life of the poor and otherwise downtrodden right up to recent days. She conveys powerfully what it feels like to reside, permanently, on the wrong side of the tracks.
Each ethnic group gets its own chapter, an episodic format that Proulx also experimented with - not always successfully - in her earlier novel, “Postcards.” Here, not only does her focus shift from one character to another, but Proulx also cannot resist throwing in little asides and parenthetical diversions in which she briefly introduces and quickly sums up entire lives of additional characters in a sentence or so. It’s dizzying and distracting.
Making it even harder for the reader to engage with “Accordion Crimes,” the characters are for the most part unsympathetic. Loners, losers, braggarts, brawlers, they have few redeeming features. Except, of course, their love for the accordion.
In her introduction, Proulx says she wrote “Accordion Crimes” during a period that included the death of her mother and several friends, a protracted move from Vermont to Wyoming and a broken wrist. Perhaps the darkness that suffuses the novel stems from that personal upheaval.
Or perhaps this is just another of Proulx’s fairy tales - this time one haunted by music echoing lives full of sighs and moans, a tale that would not ring true if it had a happy ending.