Accordion Crimes ~ Annie Proulx

Proulx is more famous for her short stories, the form in which the majority of her output takes. She is a recognised master of the form – her stories are funny and shocking, and laced always with her unique western vernacular. However she also has a number of novels under her belt – I’ve read all four. Only two could be said to be true “novels” in the sense that they concern a handful of characters and their fates for all their pages – the enjoyable “Shipping News” and the disappointing “That Old Ace In The Hole”. The other two novels, “Postcards” and “Accordion Crimes” are more akin to an extended set of short stories, each chapter related only by the underlying theme.
 
I am re-reading “Accordion Crimes”, her biggest novel, enjoying it immensely. I believe that with its scale and ambition, and astonishing breadth of characters, locations, history, timeframes, humanity – it must be a candidate for the Great American Novel, whatever that is. Eschewing metaphor, it is quite simply an examination of the American immigrant experience from every angle, and thus an examination of America itself.
 
The thread relating all the chapters is a green accordion, made by a Sicilian emigrant to America, and its various owners throughout about two hundred and fifty years of American history. It accompanies the Sicilian and his son to their new life in New Orleans, circuitously comes into the ownership of Protestant German immigrants somewhere in Pennsylvania, winds up in the hands of a French-Canadian orphan in the borderlands, Mexican-American cotton-pickers, becomes possession of a series of African-Americans (formerly slaves)…
 
It sounds twee – a collection of immigrants of all backgrounds, languages and skin-colours, united in their humanity and common cause by their shared love of, and possession of, a green accordion! It sounds equally contrived – how could such an object manage to traverse such geographies and peoples plausibly!
 
But like all Proulx’s writing, it is not at all sentimental. She writes like a man, a colourful Hemmingway – coincidence, chance, serendipity are shorn to a minimum – most of the characters have ugly ends, struggle to get by, live in a violent, racist and sexist places, are violent, racist or sexist themselves; most have loveless existences, are cruelly crushed by circumstance or by history or by ignorance. Most have painful ends, most fail to fulfil even the most basic of human potentials – fleeting happiness. Time and again you have to marvel at Proulx’s propensity for inflicting the most savage of fates on her lovingly constructed characters… And always the accordion passes through hands in a plausible manner – hocked in pawn shops, sold for food, or passed on unwanted in junkpiles on someone’s death. For the most of its life it sits gathering dust, and the characters briefly orbit around it. (Indeed, Proulx employs an idiosyncratic device to tell of the character’s fates once the accordion has left their possession – she tells the rest of their (usually short and painful, always quirky) existences in paragraphs in brackets – like this).
 
It is slow-moving, the text is knarled and requires slow-reading. But the characters are vivid and real; you care for their fortunes, are sympathetic to their flaws, are shocked by their inevitable downfall. It is clearly painstakingly researched – all the pogroms and heaves have the ring of authenticity.
 
My favourite episode is of the orphan immigrant of French-Canadian parents, Dolor – who has a childhood of such misery that Oliver Twist would wince. He somehow claws out a passable existence for himself, consoled by bluegrass music and the accordion, until afflicted by a mysterious illness. His demise is horrific (and only revealed for what it is in a subsequent chapter). He is a real character, his travails desperate and heart-rending. The brief happiness he achieves before his death, was merely a mirage, a self-delusion… I also enjoyed the Mexican-American chapter.
 
In fact, the abiding memory of the novel is the wonder at how badly Proulx treats her characters – she invents them, creates their characters, backstories, loves, losses, makes them real, and then destroys them without mercy. Each demise is more shocking than the last.
 
Finally, although I loved the novel, I wondered why there was no Irish-American owner, nor Jewish-American owner. I suppose that these two experiences have been well chronicled, and these two tribes didn’t venture as far west as others, and it is the wild west that Proulx is concerned with.
 
A wonderful novel – original and weird.