Tab Article
Ratings: ★★★★☆ (4.3/5)
Genre: Literary Fiction, Historical Fiction, Road Novel, Family Saga
Book Review:
Before she won the Pulitzer Prize for The Shipping News and captivated the world with the story that became the film Brokeback Mountain, E. Annie Proulx wrote Postcards. And what a debut it is. A sweeping, tragic, and exquisitely rendered novel, Postcards announced the arrival of a major new voice in American literature, a writer with a profound feel for the land and an unflinching eye for the struggles of those who live on it.
The novel opens in 1944 on a farm in Vermont. Loyal Blood, a young man, commits a terrible, unnamed crime that forces him to flee his home and family forever. He leaves behind his parents, his sister, and his fiancée, and begins a decades-long odyssey across the American West. From that moment on, Loyal is a man in perpetual motion, a wanderer forever cut off from love and connection. He lives a hundred different lives: mining for gold in the desert, growing beans, hunting for fossils, trapping animals, prospecting for uranium, and working on ranches. He drifts from one temporary job to the next, one makeshift home to another, always alone, always on the move.
His only link to his past is a series of postcards he sends home—brief, cryptic messages that give no hint of his whereabouts or his life. But Loyal never learns that his departure set in motion a slow tragedy for his family as well. Back in Vermont, his father struggles to keep the farm alive, his sister dreams of escape, and the family's deep connection to the land is severed with devastating consequences.
Proulx's prose is a marvel. It is spare, precise, and deeply poetic, capturing the stark beauty of the American landscape and the gritty reality of her characters' lives with equal power. Her dialogue is raspy and authentic, her humor laconic and dark. She writes with a deep, unsentimental compassion for her characters, even as she chronicles their failures and their losses.
Postcards is a novel about many things: guilt and flight, the loss of home, the harshness of the land, the elusive promise of the American dream. But above all, it is a story about loneliness, about a man who spends his entire life running from a past he can never escape. It is a remarkable achievement, a powerful and unforgettable debut from one of America's finest writers. As the Literary Review said, ''Loyal Blood is one of those rare, haunted characters who continue to live in the mind after you finish the book.''
