An Anti-Cathartic Tragedy
Dec. 4th, 2011 05:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mtvesselJun 2011
Postcards - E. Annie Proulx - Flamingo, 1994
* * *
Well, I wasn't exactly expecting a barrel of laughs. E. Annie Proulx wrote the story on which Ang Lee's fine film Brokeback Mountain is based, so a well-told tragedy about similarly uneducated and inarticulate characters was what I was expecting and was exactly what I got. The writing is fabulously rich and the characters are good, but the attempts to avoid the obvious plot developments rob the reader of the catharsis that good tragedy should have.
The book starts memorably in 1944 with a young inarticulate farmer called Loyal Blood burying the body of his girlfriend Billy in a dry stone wall after what appears to be a sexual encounter that went horribly wrong. To cover up his crime, he tells his family that he and Billy are moving away, and hits the road. His only subsequent communication with them is through an occasional postcard as he takes up a series of odd jobs including uranium mining, trapping, bean farming, fossil hunting and ranching. He never leaves a forwarding address, which is unfortunate as his disappearance has had a bad effect on the family he left behind.
The characters are very well drawn, from Loyal's forbidding father Mink to his mousy mother Jewel and ne’er do well one-armed brother Dub. None of the characters is exactly articulate and it says a lot for Proulx that she manages to keep the reader engaged with people whom we cannot really know and with whom it is hard to empathise. In part this is due to her wonderfully salty style which vividly conjures up the scenes in which the characters find themselves.
However, the plot. Proulx is a short story writer and it shows. The scenes, strong as they are, take place over many years and feel unconnected, much like the postcards that Loyal sends back. The characters also suffer a ridiculous amount of bad luck - so many awful things happen to them that I kept thinking of Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events and this made the whole thing very hard to take seriously.
Which is probably just as well, because the lack of consequence is a real problem. Proulx would probably say that she is just depicting characters, which is fair enough, but a good novel says something about human nature rather than simply observing it. It may be true that in real life tragedies just happen through bad luck or poor judgement and don’t necessarily have a meaningful cause or consequences, but in a novel, which pretty much by definition is about the development of theme or character, they must. Tragedy must have catharsis, otherwise there is no point to it. This one doesn’t and is unsatisfying as a result.
Postcards - E. Annie Proulx - Flamingo, 1994
* * *
Well, I wasn't exactly expecting a barrel of laughs. E. Annie Proulx wrote the story on which Ang Lee's fine film Brokeback Mountain is based, so a well-told tragedy about similarly uneducated and inarticulate characters was what I was expecting and was exactly what I got. The writing is fabulously rich and the characters are good, but the attempts to avoid the obvious plot developments rob the reader of the catharsis that good tragedy should have.
The book starts memorably in 1944 with a young inarticulate farmer called Loyal Blood burying the body of his girlfriend Billy in a dry stone wall after what appears to be a sexual encounter that went horribly wrong. To cover up his crime, he tells his family that he and Billy are moving away, and hits the road. His only subsequent communication with them is through an occasional postcard as he takes up a series of odd jobs including uranium mining, trapping, bean farming, fossil hunting and ranching. He never leaves a forwarding address, which is unfortunate as his disappearance has had a bad effect on the family he left behind.
The characters are very well drawn, from Loyal's forbidding father Mink to his mousy mother Jewel and ne’er do well one-armed brother Dub. None of the characters is exactly articulate and it says a lot for Proulx that she manages to keep the reader engaged with people whom we cannot really know and with whom it is hard to empathise. In part this is due to her wonderfully salty style which vividly conjures up the scenes in which the characters find themselves.
However, the plot. Proulx is a short story writer and it shows. The scenes, strong as they are, take place over many years and feel unconnected, much like the postcards that Loyal sends back. The characters also suffer a ridiculous amount of bad luck - so many awful things happen to them that I kept thinking of Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events and this made the whole thing very hard to take seriously.
Which is probably just as well, because the lack of consequence is a real problem. Proulx would probably say that she is just depicting characters, which is fair enough, but a good novel says something about human nature rather than simply observing it. It may be true that in real life tragedies just happen through bad luck or poor judgement and don’t necessarily have a meaningful cause or consequences, but in a novel, which pretty much by definition is about the development of theme or character, they must. Tragedy must have catharsis, otherwise there is no point to it. This one doesn’t and is unsatisfying as a result.