Mama's Got a Squeezebox

"Accordion Crimes"
by Annie Proulx
Scribner
June, 1996

Again, I'm starting in the middle. Annie Proulx (pronounced Proo, in case you were wondering) wrote "The Shipping News," in 94 and was suddenly the most important writer in the godgiven world. She also wrote the story, "Brokeback Mountain," which became the controversial film of the same name. This means she also wrote the catchphrase that won't quit: I wish I could quit you. I guess. I don't know becuase I didn't read that one or the News. I've decided, against all odds, to discover Ms. Proulx by reading a book from the middle of her arc: "Accordion Crimes".

So I don't have anything to compare her to--from her own pile, I mean. I can't say how this book signals the beginning of a stellar career, or this book, coming on the heels of her stellar novel, blah blah blah. I never get it easy.

I had a hard time putting this book down which created a problem because I really needed to put it down. Not only was the laundry piling up and the dog pressed against the door with an uncomfortable grimace on his snout, I had to put it down because it was just too much. Who writes like this!? The woman puts more story on one page than most artists can wring out of their pen in a year of labor. The story is---to say it is dense is too simple and not entirely correct. Precision is important because I adore this story and I want to describe it with the perfect word, I want to get it exactly right because that is what the author spent so much time doing this for me. It would be impolite not to return the favor. Her writing is, the story is, a complex divination. It does not evoke the period and times she writes about. It doesn't wrestle the people out of the paper like some books. Its much more hallucinogenic, more like a drug. You start reading and there is a weight to the story that gains momentum and suddenly you're in it, you're walking next to these people, running with them, running downhill.

Proulx's book is an excellent lesson for readers. For writers as well, but only if they read it for the sake of reading, first. Because this is a book that rewards committed readers, the kind of people who take the phone off the hook and cancel appointments, miss work, church, meals, anything for a great story.

Reading, the other side of writing, is one of the lasst great acts of magic left. But so many people have written books based on how they are taught a book should be written that they've sucked the fun out of it. I pick up a book and it lays itself out for me by the second page. The authors are told how to plan their story, how to plot it, how to create characters, how to structure for effect. It's all bullshit and it reads like a manual instead of a novel. What these poor bastards are not taught is why they should write. How they should write. They all ought to read Proulx because she's one of the first North American writers to really know what she' doing--what every writer ought to be doing.

Discovering. Searching. Following.

The perfect writer is an explorer, one of those 19th century guys with sherpas going up K12 for the first time, discovering a new species of mango wasp, submitting to an initiation ritual. Every new story is undiscovered country filled with people who've never existed till the moment the author lays eyes on them. The author's job is to get out of the way and let it happen, to follow the track of the story to it's end.

Only when the author doesn't know where she's going can her reader really have the kind of startling experience a great book supplies.

Of course, I don't know how Annie Proulx writes. She might work with a predetermined number of verbs. She might have a 12 foot high corkboard wall covered with 3x5 colored cards. I don't have any idea. All I know is she lives in Wyoming.

The book follows the life of a hand made Italian button accordion from its birth in a poor man's shop through the birth of modern America. That's a gimmick. No doubt, a literary device. But it doesn't matter. It's a damn good gimmick.

In some of the stories, you barely see the instrument. In some, it begins the story then the whole thing, the whole bloody, disjointed family history spills out of its bellows and you forget about the instrument until teh very end when it shows up and you think Oh yeah, the accordion, and you realize it's not a gimmick for the story, it's a trick, a maneuver, a discipline for the writer.

Because before you and I follow this accordion from family to family Annie Proulx did and I think she's as suprised as the rest of us by where the squeezebox ends up.

It's a good book, a chunky read. Toothsome. And take the phone off the hook. Cancel your weekend.