Running for Your Life: Barkskins, the Book

Annie Proulx puts it down. What Melville did with the thoroughly American harvest of work and souls, the whale.

She does trees. Gritty and surprising, unafraid to be slow-moving, piercing insight, breathtaking moments. Buy it, Barkskins, the Book. Or reserve it at your local library: http://bit.ly/2o9AyZn

What does it take to cook something the size and breadth of a 19th century novel, a “Moby Dick,” a “Les Miserables,” when such ambitious, glorious wonders of the human imagination are seen by number-crunching publishers as viable to the 21st century creative economy as, say, the typewriter?

Bravo to Proulx for envisioning characters like Posey Brandon, the New Brunswick hellion wench, and the soft-edged Jinot, for believing there is as much necessary art to a meditation on Indian spiritual life on Manitoulin Island, Ontario, than in Hugo’s Paris.

Just try to find the elite street in this novel, the back alley of hipster New York, the naked reach for a niche market. Nope. Not here.

Of course, she is Annie Proulx, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “The Shipping News,” the one who brought us the genre-bending short story “Brokeback Mountain,” better known as a movie. Still, she doesn’t skimp, or cut corners. She takes advantage of her star status and writes hell out of topic that others wouldn’t begin to think would be publishable. 

In the latest Paris Review, Lebanese novelist Elias Khoury tells us that in his country literature has always been safe in its marginality. That has become as much true in what I see as our increasingly authoritarian regime. Problem is, the more capitalistic the society, the less likely you’ll see literature – the kind the Khoury is talking about.

Then along comes Proulx and “Barkskins.” For folks who give a damn about literature – not just publishing – this is something to celebrate.


Next: Running for Your Life: Lee’s Miserables