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Postcards
This is story of Loyal Blood, a man who spends a lifetime on the run from a crime so terrible that it renders him forever incapable of touching a woman.
The odyssey begins on a freezing Vermont hillside in 1944 and propels Blood across the American West for forty years. Denied love and unable to settle, he lives a hundred different lives: mining gold, growing beans, hunting fossils, trapping, prospecting for uranium and ranching. His only contact with his past is through a series of postcards he sends home – not realising that in his absence disaster has befallen his family, and their deep-rooted connection with the land has been severed with devastating consequences…
‘Postcards’ was Annie Proulx’s first novel, which received huge acclaim and marked the launch of an outstanding literary career. Her works include short story collections ‘Bad Dirt’, ‘Close Range’ (featuring ‘Brokeback Mountain’) and novels such as ‘The Shipping News’ and ‘Accordion Crimes’.
The odyssey begins on a freezing Vermont hillside in 1944 and propels Blood across the American West for forty years. Denied love and unable to settle, he lives a hundred different lives: mining gold, growing beans, hunting fossils, trapping, prospecting for uranium and ranching. His only contact with his past is through a series of postcards he sends home – not realising that in his absence disaster has befallen his family, and their deep-rooted connection with the land has been severed with devastating consequences…
‘Postcards’ was Annie Proulx’s first novel, which received huge acclaim and marked the launch of an outstanding literary career. Her works include short story collections ‘Bad Dirt’, ‘Close Range’ (featuring ‘Brokeback Mountain’) and novels such as ‘The Shipping News’ and ‘Accordion Crimes’.
352 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1992
190 people are currently reading
4135 people want to read
About the author
Annie Proulx
109 books3,407 followersEdna Annie Proulx (Chinese:安妮 普鲁) is an American journalist and author. Her second novel, The Shipping News (1993), won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award for fiction in 1994. Her short story "Brokeback Mountain" was adapted as an Academy Award, BAFTA and Golden Globe Award-winning major motion picture released in 2005. Brokeback Mountain received massive critical acclaim and went on to be nominated for a leading eight Academy Awards, winning three of them. (However, the movie did not win Best Picture, a situation with which Proulx made public her disappointment.) She won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for her first novel, Postcards.
She has written most of her stories and books simply as Annie Proulx, but has also used the names E. Annie Proulx and E.A. Proulx.
She has written most of her stories and books simply as Annie Proulx, but has also used the names E. Annie Proulx and E.A. Proulx.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 483 reviews
May 24, 2014
Why have so few of my GR friends reviewed this brilliant book by such a well-known author? Note: The first two pages have a rather brutal scene (though the details are vague), but there's nothing else like that in the rest of the book, and everything that follows, arises from this incident.
This is Proulx's first novel, published a year before the excellent The Shipping News. It's equally good, but has a very different structure, and the language is not as distinctively clipped or telegraphic.
It tells the stories of the diverging lives of the Blood family (impoverished farmers in Vermont), from the mid '40s until the '70s or '80s, along with the stories of others involved in their lives. The environment is harsh, the people tough, but the landscapes often beautiful - and Proulx's writing switches effortlessly to reflect these contrasts.
Most of the chapters start with a postcard to or from one of the protagonists. Sometimes it explains what's going to happen in the chapter, but at other times it's just a side story. You only ever see the written side; never the picture. You could almost treat the book as a collection of short stories, or even read just the postcards and try to cobble it all together, though I wouldn't recommend the latter unless you've already read the book.
SYNOPSIS
The Blood family consists of Mink and Jewell (father and mother), sons in their 20s (at the start), Loyal and Dub (Marvin), and teenage daughter, Mernelle. Loyal is a devoted, intuitive and knowledgeable farmer; Dub has always been slow, aimless and reckless, and Mernelle is dreamy.
On the first page, Loyal's girlfriend, Billy, dies. He blames himself, and is even more sure everyone else will blame him, so he hides the body, and leaves family and farm. "It wasn't the idea that he could go anywhere, but the idea that he had to go somewhere." It remains ambiguous as to how justified his haunted guilt at her death is, but it never leaves him. And somehow, well before the end of the book, it's hard to hate Loyal for what he did.
Loyal spends his life travelling the USA, doing a variety of mostly outdoor jobs (trapping, mining, prospecting, farming), meeting intriguing characters along the way. He sends the occasional postcard home, and always hankers after a farm and family of his own, though his inability to get intimate with women makes the latter impossible. He realises "The price for getting away. No wife, no family, no children, no human comfort in the quotidian unfolding of his life". Meanwhile, his absence, and lack of return address, changes the lives of all those he leaves behind.
NAILS
There is a striking description on the second page, "her nails glowed with the luminous hardness that marks the newly dead", and this lodged in my mind, priming me to notice the many, many references to nails (finger, toe, claw, and metal) that followed: at least 20 in the first 125 pages, then none that I noticed for over 100 pages, and just a smattering from there to the end.
Nails are key for Loyal, too: when he first met Billy, "her nails gleamed", and years later, he still remembers "the flash of her nails" and how pointed they were.
Neatly, the final two mentions of nails that I spotted also relate to the dead or dying.
There's a whole thesis in these nails, and a far more interesting one than the meaning of postcards (Mernelle has a friend who collects them) or bears (hunted, toy ones collected by Mernelle, as well as being on a job lot of postcards).
LANGUAGE - and NAMES
Most of the chapters are a chunk of narrative about one or more characters, but at regular intervals, there's a short one called "What I See". These are in the present tense, and much more stream-of-consciousness, often featuring lush descriptions of an arid landscape, or something rather abstract.
It's a feature of all the chapters that it's not always immediately obvious who it's about, which keeps you turning the pages (and isn't drawn out to an irritating degree).
As in all the Proulx I've read, many of the characters have unusual names. Often they are pertinent, or oxymoronic, or maybe both (e.g. Loyal Blood), but others are just bizarre: a man called Toot Nipples, for example! But there are limits: even Loyal thinks it odd that a man named his mule after his daughter.
CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT
This is a great strength of the book: so many characters over so many decades, and they change a great deal, but it feels like a plausible reaction to circumstances (except for Dub), and I really felt I knew and understood them. When Mernelle grows up "there was a sureness in her that estranged her from the old child's life".
OPTIMISM, PESSIMISM, FATE
Early on, we're told the Bloods have a "knack for doing the wrong thing", and that largely proves true. Later, Ben the amateur astronomer says to Loyal "I see the way you throw yourself at trouble. Punish yourself with work. How you don't get anywhere except a different place."
There are a couple of recurring themes that ought to be depressing, and yet the characters are always hopeful of things getting better (and some things do), so overall, it isn't a depressing book.
* Thwarted longing for children (and of those who do have them, most are painfully estranged)
* Valuable things, long saved-up for or treasured, are lost, destroyed or stolen
Although Proulx isn't crass enough to spell it out, they're all striving for The American Dream, but most never quite reach it, and Loyal in particular, wants to do "something of value".
FREEDOM OR BURDEN OF TRAVEL?
Loyal doesn't feel he has much of a choice about travelling, and is resigned to it. In contrast, the liberation his mother finds when she learns to drive in her fifties, is joyous: "continuity broke: when she drove, her stifled youth unfurled like a ribbon" and "the pleasure of choosing which turns and roads to take" is a literal and metaphorical description of her empowerment. Driving also gives her a new appreciation of landscape: "When you'd been driving with your eyes on the road for hours, you wanted to let them stretch out to the boundaries of the earth." And yet, in keeping with the theme of valuable things being lost, even this has a sting in its tale.
OUTSIDERS
Initially, the Bloods are atavistically tied to their land, but as the stories diverge, they (and others) become outsiders.
* Incomers "moved into farm houses hoping to fit their lives into the rooms, to fit their shoes to the stair treads".
* An incomer was "urban in habitat but haunted from childhood by fantasies of wilderness".
"This family has a habit of disappearing. Everyone... is gone except me. And I'm the end of it."
IS THERE ONLY ONE WAY TO LOVE; CAN ONE CHANGE?
QUOTES ABOUT LANDSCAPE
* "The October afternoon collapsed into evening."
* "Evening haze... blurred a sky discolored like a stained silk skirt."
* "The overclouded sky was as dull as old wire."
* "Heat ricocheted off the colorless rocks. Nothing moved. The sky leaned on them, the earth pressed upward."
* "The work of his hands had changed the land... The smooth fields were echoes of himself in the landscape."
* "The atavistic yearning that swept him when he stood beneath the trees... he was in an ancient time that lured him but which he could not understand in any way... The kernel of life , tiny, heavy, deep red in color, was secreted in these gabbling woods."
* Florida swamp: "Dub feels the canoe slip through the tea-colored water, sees the water ruptured by iridescent gas bubbles, patterned by the checkerboard backs and wood-knot eyes of alligators, clouds of egrets slanting out of the choked trees... The plangent call of rain crown under the long layers of clouds like pressed black linen."
* "Water charged with leaves raced in the gutters, wet boots flashed like flints. The window of his house shone in the darkness like squares of melting butter."#
* "The teeth of autumn gnawed at the light."
OTHER QUOTES
* "His peculiar voice that was both sweet and grainy, like the meat of a pear."
* "The barn stank of ammonia, sour milk, cloying hay and wet iron."
* A husband "had crushed her into a corner of life". Widowhood isn't always bad.
* Half brothers who only recently met bond over land, "The property was like an ear-trumpet through which they could understand each other."
* "The electric feeling of quick money was everywhere" amongst those prospecting with Geiger counters.
* "The dulled eyes in their heavy hammocks of flesh were as incurious as those of a street musician."
* "The woman's shape was as formless as poured sugar."
* "He'd trained himself by now to need and want little... The unsecured scaffolding of his life rested on forgetting."
This is Proulx's first novel, published a year before the excellent The Shipping News. It's equally good, but has a very different structure, and the language is not as distinctively clipped or telegraphic.
It tells the stories of the diverging lives of the Blood family (impoverished farmers in Vermont), from the mid '40s until the '70s or '80s, along with the stories of others involved in their lives. The environment is harsh, the people tough, but the landscapes often beautiful - and Proulx's writing switches effortlessly to reflect these contrasts.
Most of the chapters start with a postcard to or from one of the protagonists. Sometimes it explains what's going to happen in the chapter, but at other times it's just a side story. You only ever see the written side; never the picture. You could almost treat the book as a collection of short stories, or even read just the postcards and try to cobble it all together, though I wouldn't recommend the latter unless you've already read the book.
SYNOPSIS
The Blood family consists of Mink and Jewell (father and mother), sons in their 20s (at the start), Loyal and Dub (Marvin), and teenage daughter, Mernelle. Loyal is a devoted, intuitive and knowledgeable farmer; Dub has always been slow, aimless and reckless, and Mernelle is dreamy.
On the first page, Loyal's girlfriend, Billy, dies. He blames himself, and is even more sure everyone else will blame him, so he hides the body, and leaves family and farm. "It wasn't the idea that he could go anywhere, but the idea that he had to go somewhere." It remains ambiguous as to how justified his haunted guilt at her death is, but it never leaves him. And somehow, well before the end of the book, it's hard to hate Loyal for what he did.
Loyal spends his life travelling the USA, doing a variety of mostly outdoor jobs (trapping, mining, prospecting, farming), meeting intriguing characters along the way. He sends the occasional postcard home, and always hankers after a farm and family of his own, though his inability to get intimate with women makes the latter impossible. He realises "The price for getting away. No wife, no family, no children, no human comfort in the quotidian unfolding of his life". Meanwhile, his absence, and lack of return address, changes the lives of all those he leaves behind.
NAILS
There is a striking description on the second page, "her nails glowed with the luminous hardness that marks the newly dead", and this lodged in my mind, priming me to notice the many, many references to nails (finger, toe, claw, and metal) that followed: at least 20 in the first 125 pages, then none that I noticed for over 100 pages, and just a smattering from there to the end.
Nails are key for Loyal, too: when he first met Billy, "her nails gleamed", and years later, he still remembers "the flash of her nails" and how pointed they were.
Neatly, the final two mentions of nails that I spotted also relate to the dead or dying.
There's a whole thesis in these nails, and a far more interesting one than the meaning of postcards (Mernelle has a friend who collects them) or bears (hunted, toy ones collected by Mernelle, as well as being on a job lot of postcards).
LANGUAGE - and NAMES
Most of the chapters are a chunk of narrative about one or more characters, but at regular intervals, there's a short one called "What I See". These are in the present tense, and much more stream-of-consciousness, often featuring lush descriptions of an arid landscape, or something rather abstract.
It's a feature of all the chapters that it's not always immediately obvious who it's about, which keeps you turning the pages (and isn't drawn out to an irritating degree).
As in all the Proulx I've read, many of the characters have unusual names. Often they are pertinent, or oxymoronic, or maybe both (e.g. Loyal Blood), but others are just bizarre: a man called Toot Nipples, for example! But there are limits: even Loyal thinks it odd that a man named his mule after his daughter.
CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT
This is a great strength of the book: so many characters over so many decades, and they change a great deal, but it feels like a plausible reaction to circumstances (except for Dub), and I really felt I knew and understood them. When Mernelle grows up "there was a sureness in her that estranged her from the old child's life".
OPTIMISM, PESSIMISM, FATE
Early on, we're told the Bloods have a "knack for doing the wrong thing", and that largely proves true. Later, Ben the amateur astronomer says to Loyal "I see the way you throw yourself at trouble. Punish yourself with work. How you don't get anywhere except a different place."
There are a couple of recurring themes that ought to be depressing, and yet the characters are always hopeful of things getting better (and some things do), so overall, it isn't a depressing book.
* Thwarted longing for children (and of those who do have them, most are painfully estranged)
* Valuable things, long saved-up for or treasured, are lost, destroyed or stolen
Although Proulx isn't crass enough to spell it out, they're all striving for The American Dream, but most never quite reach it, and Loyal in particular, wants to do "something of value".
FREEDOM OR BURDEN OF TRAVEL?
Loyal doesn't feel he has much of a choice about travelling, and is resigned to it. In contrast, the liberation his mother finds when she learns to drive in her fifties, is joyous: "continuity broke: when she drove, her stifled youth unfurled like a ribbon" and "the pleasure of choosing which turns and roads to take" is a literal and metaphorical description of her empowerment. Driving also gives her a new appreciation of landscape: "When you'd been driving with your eyes on the road for hours, you wanted to let them stretch out to the boundaries of the earth." And yet, in keeping with the theme of valuable things being lost, even this has a sting in its tale.
OUTSIDERS
Initially, the Bloods are atavistically tied to their land, but as the stories diverge, they (and others) become outsiders.
* Incomers "moved into farm houses hoping to fit their lives into the rooms, to fit their shoes to the stair treads".
* An incomer was "urban in habitat but haunted from childhood by fantasies of wilderness".
"This family has a habit of disappearing. Everyone... is gone except me. And I'm the end of it."
IS THERE ONLY ONE WAY TO LOVE; CAN ONE CHANGE?
QUOTES ABOUT LANDSCAPE
* "The October afternoon collapsed into evening."
* "Evening haze... blurred a sky discolored like a stained silk skirt."
* "The overclouded sky was as dull as old wire."
* "Heat ricocheted off the colorless rocks. Nothing moved. The sky leaned on them, the earth pressed upward."
* "The work of his hands had changed the land... The smooth fields were echoes of himself in the landscape."
* "The atavistic yearning that swept him when he stood beneath the trees... he was in an ancient time that lured him but which he could not understand in any way... The kernel of life , tiny, heavy, deep red in color, was secreted in these gabbling woods."
* Florida swamp: "Dub feels the canoe slip through the tea-colored water, sees the water ruptured by iridescent gas bubbles, patterned by the checkerboard backs and wood-knot eyes of alligators, clouds of egrets slanting out of the choked trees... The plangent call of rain crown under the long layers of clouds like pressed black linen."
* "Water charged with leaves raced in the gutters, wet boots flashed like flints. The window of his house shone in the darkness like squares of melting butter."#
* "The teeth of autumn gnawed at the light."
OTHER QUOTES
* "His peculiar voice that was both sweet and grainy, like the meat of a pear."
* "The barn stank of ammonia, sour milk, cloying hay and wet iron."
* A husband "had crushed her into a corner of life". Widowhood isn't always bad.
* Half brothers who only recently met bond over land, "The property was like an ear-trumpet through which they could understand each other."
* "The electric feeling of quick money was everywhere" amongst those prospecting with Geiger counters.
* "The dulled eyes in their heavy hammocks of flesh were as incurious as those of a street musician."
* "The woman's shape was as formless as poured sugar."
* "He'd trained himself by now to need and want little... The unsecured scaffolding of his life rested on forgetting."
January 4, 2008
Proulx is fucking brilliant. The first book I read by her was Shipping News and I was blown away at how she, like ee cummings used punctuation or the lack thereof to make words hang like actual things.
I think Postcards was her first book but that she couldn't get it published until Shipping News was out and did so well. I think she wrote it in college. This makes it even more startling to me.
Postcards is raw and rough and very male. But this woman can write men, particularly men from the heartland: travelers, wanderers, nomads, vagabond (sorry Metallica on the brain), so that you FEEL them.
I don't particularly like or love her men, but I like watching them walk our big country stem to stern. In scope Postcards is uniquely American.
It's good, my friends.
I think Postcards was her first book but that she couldn't get it published until Shipping News was out and did so well. I think she wrote it in college. This makes it even more startling to me.
Postcards is raw and rough and very male. But this woman can write men, particularly men from the heartland: travelers, wanderers, nomads, vagabond (sorry Metallica on the brain), so that you FEEL them.
I don't particularly like or love her men, but I like watching them walk our big country stem to stern. In scope Postcards is uniquely American.
It's good, my friends.
May 28, 2018
I thought I had a great idea. I saw this on my bookshelf and assumed it was one of those "slice of Americana" books that would put me in the holiday mood.
Oops.
Holiday mood? How about Deliverance meets Looking for Mr. Goodbar, with a side of rural Pulp Fiction?
I purchased this book a few months back after falling hard for Proulx's brilliant The Shipping News. I have not changed my mind about Annie Proulx's writing, but this novel was a horror to read.
Every part of this world (presumably our world) is filled with danger and violence. Here, one can not carefully place one's foot on any surface without disaster. This depiction of 1940s America is one of the bleakest I have ever encountered.
This novel was upsetting to the point of giving me nightmares, and I had to quit it before anything resembling redemption occurred. This is a dark and hopeless debut novel and I couldn't, in good conscience, recommend it to anyone.
Oops.
Holiday mood? How about Deliverance meets Looking for Mr. Goodbar, with a side of rural Pulp Fiction?
I purchased this book a few months back after falling hard for Proulx's brilliant The Shipping News. I have not changed my mind about Annie Proulx's writing, but this novel was a horror to read.
Every part of this world (presumably our world) is filled with danger and violence. Here, one can not carefully place one's foot on any surface without disaster. This depiction of 1940s America is one of the bleakest I have ever encountered.
This novel was upsetting to the point of giving me nightmares, and I had to quit it before anything resembling redemption occurred. This is a dark and hopeless debut novel and I couldn't, in good conscience, recommend it to anyone.
May 11, 2014
It's like every sentence you have to hack out of the rockface, it takes forever to read the thing, it's like some kind of titanic struggle you have with it, but when you finally do finish the damn thing you feel like you've been through some kind of... experience. Not sure I need another going over by E Annie Proulx, but this one was memorable.
The author : "Say my name!"
PB : "Ooof, E Annie!"
Pow, kick, bash.
The author : "Say my name!"
PB : "Cough - I already said it - E Annie Proulx! E ANNIE PROULX!!"
The author : "Yeah. Okay. Well, don't forget it."
Kick! Oooof! Oww!
The author : "Say my name!"
PB : "Ooof, E Annie!"
Pow, kick, bash.
The author : "Say my name!"
PB : "Cough - I already said it - E Annie Proulx! E ANNIE PROULX!!"
The author : "Yeah. Okay. Well, don't forget it."
Kick! Oooof! Oww!
August 1, 2022
Unlike many I was not enthralled by The Shipping News; I was bored. Given The Shipping News won both the Pulitzer and National Book awards I have often wondered if I missed something, but regardless, I approached Annie Proulx’s Postcards with low expectations.
Postcards is a depressing novel, but I am okay with that. Loyal Blood commits an atrocity at the beginning of the novel and runs away to avoid the consequences. He not only leaves his family in the lurch, since the Blood family has a small farm and needs every able body to get the daily work completed, but Loyal is clearly the foundation on which the family’s future hopes are built. He is the one with new ideas and the energy and drive to pursue those ideas. When Loyal disappears the disintegration of the family begins. As we watch that happen, we also follow Loyal as he moves from job to job, looking for an opportunity to make enough money so that he can buy a small farm and begin anew. Loyal’s talents and intelligence are evident. He sends postcards back to his family, never including his return address, so the only communication is one-way.
Despite growing up on the East Coast of the US and spending much of her life there, Proulx seems to have adopted the American Midwest and West. In 1994 she moved to Wyoming; she has written three collections of short stories set in Wyoming, there is of course her big success with Brokeback Mountain and she now lives in Washington state. Her affinity for this part of the US is evident in her descriptions of the land and the people in Postcards. Postcards was Proulx’s first novel. I enjoyed it.
Postcards is a depressing novel, but I am okay with that. Loyal Blood commits an atrocity at the beginning of the novel and runs away to avoid the consequences. He not only leaves his family in the lurch, since the Blood family has a small farm and needs every able body to get the daily work completed, but Loyal is clearly the foundation on which the family’s future hopes are built. He is the one with new ideas and the energy and drive to pursue those ideas. When Loyal disappears the disintegration of the family begins. As we watch that happen, we also follow Loyal as he moves from job to job, looking for an opportunity to make enough money so that he can buy a small farm and begin anew. Loyal’s talents and intelligence are evident. He sends postcards back to his family, never including his return address, so the only communication is one-way.
Despite growing up on the East Coast of the US and spending much of her life there, Proulx seems to have adopted the American Midwest and West. In 1994 she moved to Wyoming; she has written three collections of short stories set in Wyoming, there is of course her big success with Brokeback Mountain and she now lives in Washington state. Her affinity for this part of the US is evident in her descriptions of the land and the people in Postcards. Postcards was Proulx’s first novel. I enjoyed it.
December 21, 2007
"Don't come out my farm no more with your damn insemnation racket. We got rid the Holstins. Guess we stick with god local Jersey stock. Do it the old fashion way with a BULL.
—Minkton M. Blood"
It’s a rich, dark, often humorous, in ways painful, epic escapade.
Annie Proulx has her characters experience all kinds of biblical catastrophes. Stuck in a mine explosion with cold water up to the knees so that the feet swell up and eventually the soles of the feet come off when the boots are removed following rescue. An enormous splinter of wood shoots into someone’s eye. Giant tumbleweed the size of trucks enclose a house so the person has to climb down sheets from a second floor window. She enjoys having the men break their pelvis’s...that’s happened more than once. People are always losing limbs and getting debilitating head injuries. Many kill themselves. Or they die in strange unlucky ways, always surprised when their heart suddenly stops. One woman died from blood poisoning after having fallen through some decayed floorboards and gotten scratched with some rusty nails. For some reason I don’t find it depressing, just fascinating and funny—the way Kafka is hilarious.
This book follows the life of the Blood family during hard economic times for several decades as farm life is overtaken by second-home owners and McDonald's invade the rural life-style. You might say the family is cursed or it's just life. Or it's the Book of Job. Or it's hell to pay for a crime that happened in a split second and may even have been an accident. It's existential, Western Gothic.
—Minkton M. Blood"
It’s a rich, dark, often humorous, in ways painful, epic escapade.
Annie Proulx has her characters experience all kinds of biblical catastrophes. Stuck in a mine explosion with cold water up to the knees so that the feet swell up and eventually the soles of the feet come off when the boots are removed following rescue. An enormous splinter of wood shoots into someone’s eye. Giant tumbleweed the size of trucks enclose a house so the person has to climb down sheets from a second floor window. She enjoys having the men break their pelvis’s...that’s happened more than once. People are always losing limbs and getting debilitating head injuries. Many kill themselves. Or they die in strange unlucky ways, always surprised when their heart suddenly stops. One woman died from blood poisoning after having fallen through some decayed floorboards and gotten scratched with some rusty nails. For some reason I don’t find it depressing, just fascinating and funny—the way Kafka is hilarious.
This book follows the life of the Blood family during hard economic times for several decades as farm life is overtaken by second-home owners and McDonald's invade the rural life-style. You might say the family is cursed or it's just life. Or it's the Book of Job. Or it's hell to pay for a crime that happened in a split second and may even have been an accident. It's existential, Western Gothic.
July 19, 2025
Thick, swampy writing, bestial circumstances, and an alarmingly high mortality rate. Did you know a feak was a lock of hair? I suspect Proulx was hunting through 19th century dictionaries.
October 27, 2008
A hard book--not difficult to read, but the characters are hardened, their lives unforgiving, the land stark and mean. Bones jut up out of the soil and rock of this book, suddenly exposed and horrifying.
Proulx contrasts well against Kingsolver, who is all life, growth and healing, while in this book Proulx draws the living dead. Farmers who have lost everything, including limbs. A young man driven from home by guilt that wracks his entire life. Forty years of wandering the West without love or friendship or rest for the weary.
I don't mean to make this book sound horrific; it's a good story. She's an amazing writer. The flow of narrative is original, unpredictable and compelling.
Most of the chapters begin with an image of a postcard, hand-written and addressed, sent from one character to another. The magic of the postcards, and of the chapters themselves, is that we as readers often don't know who these characters are or what their situation is when we begin reading.
In this way, the beginning of each chapter is almost like the beginning of a book. We have to keep reading in order to find out what's going on, who these people are. Proulx keeps us delving, hunting through her landscapes like Loyal with his coyote traps, noting each twig and blade of grass.
We have to trust her to give us the story. She doesn't always give it, either. Some things we will never know. But this is a satisfying book in the end. It has a flavor all of its own.
It tastes of cracked leather, sagebrush, smoke, windblown dust, old bacon grease and motor oil.
Proulx contrasts well against Kingsolver, who is all life, growth and healing, while in this book Proulx draws the living dead. Farmers who have lost everything, including limbs. A young man driven from home by guilt that wracks his entire life. Forty years of wandering the West without love or friendship or rest for the weary.
I don't mean to make this book sound horrific; it's a good story. She's an amazing writer. The flow of narrative is original, unpredictable and compelling.
Most of the chapters begin with an image of a postcard, hand-written and addressed, sent from one character to another. The magic of the postcards, and of the chapters themselves, is that we as readers often don't know who these characters are or what their situation is when we begin reading.
In this way, the beginning of each chapter is almost like the beginning of a book. We have to keep reading in order to find out what's going on, who these people are. Proulx keeps us delving, hunting through her landscapes like Loyal with his coyote traps, noting each twig and blade of grass.
We have to trust her to give us the story. She doesn't always give it, either. Some things we will never know. But this is a satisfying book in the end. It has a flavor all of its own.
It tastes of cracked leather, sagebrush, smoke, windblown dust, old bacon grease and motor oil.
did-not-finish
January 29, 2023DNF - page 23 (7%)
Do you ever just start a book and feel like it's just throwing words at you, too quickly or too hard to understand what it's saying?
Yeah.
Also, how do you accidentally kill your girlfriend while having sex? I'm so confused about this opening scene lmao. Like what did homeboy DO???
Do you ever just start a book and feel like it's just throwing words at you, too quickly or too hard to understand what it's saying?
Yeah.
Also, how do you accidentally kill your girlfriend while having sex? I'm so confused about this opening scene lmao. Like what did homeboy DO???
November 23, 2016
To be honest, I picked this book up because I thought I wouldn't like it and could remove it from my TBR. Not the case! Even though subjects as fossil hunting and uranium mining aren't at the top of my interests, those subjects are covered briefly. There is a ton of research in this book.
This is a very dense book and a reader will get from it as much as s/he puts in. Some of the reviews here are almost Cliff-Noteish on things I never caught. On the other hand the postcards that start each chapter can be light-hearted and amusing and not everyone has a terrible life (although terrible things happen to each character).
While this isn't as bleak as As I Lay Dying or Tobacco Road the feel is similar.
This is a very dense book and a reader will get from it as much as s/he puts in. Some of the reviews here are almost Cliff-Noteish on things I never caught. On the other hand the postcards that start each chapter can be light-hearted and amusing and not everyone has a terrible life (although terrible things happen to each character).
While this isn't as bleak as As I Lay Dying or Tobacco Road the feel is similar.
July 3, 2020
Postcards by Annie Proulx won the Pen Faulkner Award in 1993.
I really enjoyed this novel and more so than her more famous work ‘The Shipping News’. A highly realistic multi-generational American saga rolled into just three hundred pages. Although a large part of the book is centered on the family and their farm in the Northeast, as Loyal and his brother scatter across the country, Proulx vividly weaves numerous places like Moab, Florida, northern New Mexico and the Badlands into a story that began in Vermont.
The genius in this book, beyond the imagery, is how the murder on the first page keeps the story centered on the family - as we wait in suspense for the other shoe to drop and the law to catch up.
4.5 stars.
I really enjoyed this novel and more so than her more famous work ‘The Shipping News’. A highly realistic multi-generational American saga rolled into just three hundred pages. Although a large part of the book is centered on the family and their farm in the Northeast, as Loyal and his brother scatter across the country, Proulx vividly weaves numerous places like Moab, Florida, northern New Mexico and the Badlands into a story that began in Vermont.
The genius in this book, beyond the imagery, is how the murder on the first page keeps the story centered on the family - as we wait in suspense for the other shoe to drop and the law to catch up.
4.5 stars.
September 6, 2011
Annie Proulx. 2009. Postcards. London: Fourth Estate-HarperCollins. £7.99/$12: 340 pages.
Finished 6 September 2011. In a recent email to my brother John, I wrote, ‘Am reading Annie Proulx' book Postcards. Just when ya think things can't get worse, they do. Strangely reassuring, that woman's writing is.’
At least one knows what to expect. Postcards is every bit as awful, full of violence and regret as Proulx’ lovely The Shipping News. So why does her writing inspire us? Why does it so faithfully describe some aspects of dairy farming, even farmer suicide? Perhaps it’s the lack of bitterness. Anger and its consequent spiral of violence is acknowledged a terrible thing. But Jewell finally recognises that anger helped her testy husband Mink work the unforgiving hill farm that was always and forever off the map of New Deal rural electrification.
The book that most reminds me of Postcards is Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ One Hundred Years of Solitude. I’m the only reader I know who didn’t like 100 Years (because it took that long to read, making the characters hard to keep straight). The books are, however, similar, in that both Proulx and Marquez are capable of creating remarkable characters and life histories in a trice. The crime that truncates Loyal and Billy’s elopement is just the archetype for dozens of other troubles which, (if not rectified by a shotgun placebo) may be left dangling in the wind of the reader’s barb-wire imagination.
Cover blurbs extol the book as the best treatment of migrant workers since John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath. What could be more apt for the nastiest double-dip recession US workers have suffered since 1929-39?
The story has pockets of happiness. Most of the ‘winners’ are folks who refuse to accept their fate, or family’s past. Matriarch Jewell, after Mink is gone, learns to drive, gets a part-time job in a cannery, and experiences more comforts in a trailer park than she ever did as a farmwife – dreaming of pasting a ‘This Car Climbed Mt. Washington’ sticker on her VW. Another, an acned orphan of 19, advertises in a newspaper for a wife. A human interest writer matchmates Mirnelle and him, to their general happiness. Even Dub, Loyal’s younger brother – a dreamer and generally amiable idiot – finds years of success, and an interestingly piratical Cuban wife as his helpmate, in Miami real estate development. Like the millionaire instructor in his matchbook real estate school, he refuses to accept his poverty. Of course the IRS is attracted to him too, but compared to patriarch Mink, the husband and wife team are living the high life. Will it last?
Only a woman could have written this book. Any male writer attempting this plot - without main character Loyal enduring even more haunting guilt, and driven inexorably to some legal reckoning – would have been crucified by reviewers – even in a post-feminist era that gives writers more latitude. But Annie Proulx rises above political correctness to create an existential quilt – however reeking of dirty feet and dog fur – of real art. Many of the 'real Americas' inhabited by bartenders, farmers, miners, paleontologists, mail scammers and secretaries are known intimately by Ms. Proulx, who was born in 1935. Long may she continue.
Finished 6 September 2011. In a recent email to my brother John, I wrote, ‘Am reading Annie Proulx' book Postcards. Just when ya think things can't get worse, they do. Strangely reassuring, that woman's writing is.’
At least one knows what to expect. Postcards is every bit as awful, full of violence and regret as Proulx’ lovely The Shipping News. So why does her writing inspire us? Why does it so faithfully describe some aspects of dairy farming, even farmer suicide? Perhaps it’s the lack of bitterness. Anger and its consequent spiral of violence is acknowledged a terrible thing. But Jewell finally recognises that anger helped her testy husband Mink work the unforgiving hill farm that was always and forever off the map of New Deal rural electrification.
The book that most reminds me of Postcards is Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ One Hundred Years of Solitude. I’m the only reader I know who didn’t like 100 Years (because it took that long to read, making the characters hard to keep straight). The books are, however, similar, in that both Proulx and Marquez are capable of creating remarkable characters and life histories in a trice. The crime that truncates Loyal and Billy’s elopement is just the archetype for dozens of other troubles which, (if not rectified by a shotgun placebo) may be left dangling in the wind of the reader’s barb-wire imagination.
Cover blurbs extol the book as the best treatment of migrant workers since John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath. What could be more apt for the nastiest double-dip recession US workers have suffered since 1929-39?
The story has pockets of happiness. Most of the ‘winners’ are folks who refuse to accept their fate, or family’s past. Matriarch Jewell, after Mink is gone, learns to drive, gets a part-time job in a cannery, and experiences more comforts in a trailer park than she ever did as a farmwife – dreaming of pasting a ‘This Car Climbed Mt. Washington’ sticker on her VW. Another, an acned orphan of 19, advertises in a newspaper for a wife. A human interest writer matchmates Mirnelle and him, to their general happiness. Even Dub, Loyal’s younger brother – a dreamer and generally amiable idiot – finds years of success, and an interestingly piratical Cuban wife as his helpmate, in Miami real estate development. Like the millionaire instructor in his matchbook real estate school, he refuses to accept his poverty. Of course the IRS is attracted to him too, but compared to patriarch Mink, the husband and wife team are living the high life. Will it last?
Only a woman could have written this book. Any male writer attempting this plot - without main character Loyal enduring even more haunting guilt, and driven inexorably to some legal reckoning – would have been crucified by reviewers – even in a post-feminist era that gives writers more latitude. But Annie Proulx rises above political correctness to create an existential quilt – however reeking of dirty feet and dog fur – of real art. Many of the 'real Americas' inhabited by bartenders, farmers, miners, paleontologists, mail scammers and secretaries are known intimately by Ms. Proulx, who was born in 1935. Long may she continue.
June 18, 2015
I do not think that Proulx's choice of a name for her lead character is one lightly arrived upon. His name is Loyal Blood and his first act at the opening of this novel is to draw blood from a girl who he rapes and murders. This is done almost off-stage and while the act itself shapes Loyal and the rest of his life, this is not the story of a murder or a murderer. With such an opening, it is almost impossible to believe that you could develop a feeling of empathy for Loyal, but you do. Proulx knows her characters and because of this, you know them as well.
The disintegration of the Blood family is a sad thing to watch. Each of them is tied so tenuously to the other that they seem to drift in life without ever touching. They are rough and coarse and sometimes mean and unfeeling, but the travails they endure (particularly Loyal) seem over-exacting, cruel and unusual punishments. Loyal never stops paying for his moment of anger that leaves Billy dead, and his punishment includes an inability to ever touch a woman again, separating him from all possibility of redemption. Somehow you know that unlike Job, God is never going to make all this suffering up to him in any way.
What strikes me most about Proulx is that she draws characters that few of us may have ever known in life, but that each of us knows and believes exist. Loyal is real. He is not over the top. He is someone who is sitting in a dive cafeteria right now being avoided by the other patrons because of disdain and just a bit of fear.
This is Annie Proulx's first novel and as such is a remarkable achievement. It is not the equal of The Shipping News but it does have that flavor and appeal. It is well worth the time spent.
The disintegration of the Blood family is a sad thing to watch. Each of them is tied so tenuously to the other that they seem to drift in life without ever touching. They are rough and coarse and sometimes mean and unfeeling, but the travails they endure (particularly Loyal) seem over-exacting, cruel and unusual punishments. Loyal never stops paying for his moment of anger that leaves Billy dead, and his punishment includes an inability to ever touch a woman again, separating him from all possibility of redemption. Somehow you know that unlike Job, God is never going to make all this suffering up to him in any way.
What strikes me most about Proulx is that she draws characters that few of us may have ever known in life, but that each of us knows and believes exist. Loyal is real. He is not over the top. He is someone who is sitting in a dive cafeteria right now being avoided by the other patrons because of disdain and just a bit of fear.
This is Annie Proulx's first novel and as such is a remarkable achievement. It is not the equal of The Shipping News but it does have that flavor and appeal. It is well worth the time spent.
April 1, 2010
The more of Proulx I read, the more of Proulx I want to read. In this book she frames the passage of time and place through postcards sent to and from the characters in the novel. The protagonist, Loyal Blood, careens through life trying to flee from or reconcile a youthful evil deed. When we meet the man, he is a laconic youngster, wary and skeptical. We watch him evolve, into and out of relationships, into and out of professions, and finally from silent to loquacious as his sharp mind begins to wander, loosening his tongue. Towards the end of the book, we see into his soul in a rambling monologue; He pontificates on a collection of hats, some of which adorned the heads of long-gone movie stars, “It’s like he’s (Hoot Gibson) dead, but the hat’s still alive.” This could explain Loyal’s own primal error: the deed is done, but the spirit is still alive and screaming over his head.
As usual, Proulx paints dynamic portraits of every day characters. She takes us all the way, forcing us to interact with people’s oddities, frailties, and graces. The journey moves from coast to coast, exposing the land, the communities, the commerce, and the weather that shapes people’s lives.
As usual, Proulx paints dynamic portraits of every day characters. She takes us all the way, forcing us to interact with people’s oddities, frailties, and graces. The journey moves from coast to coast, exposing the land, the communities, the commerce, and the weather that shapes people’s lives.
September 12, 2007
if anyone had told me that i could open a book that began with a rape and murder and by the end of the book actually empathise with the male character, i'd have called them nuts. but i did.
March 24, 2011
On the front of my copy is a quote from a review by Frederick Busch of the Chicago Tribune: "A rich, dark and brilliant feast of a book." Perfect description. In the first few pages I felt this would go on my fictitious top ten list. Annie Proulx is an extraordinarily gifted author. Postcards was her debut.
The postcards at the beginning of each chapter give us information from outside the story we might not get anywhere else. They give us a timeframe for the setting of each chapter, or perhaps something in the character's own words, or perhaps a letter from something outside the story, such as a doctor or the IRS. The book lacks the continuity that a plot-driven novel would provide, but that is not to say nothing happens. Neither is it a collection of short stories. Readers of my reviews know I prefer characterization and I feel this is as much the characterization of a family as that of a person.
Yes, Loyal is the central character, but it was his mother's voice that I heard.
The postcards at the beginning of each chapter give us information from outside the story we might not get anywhere else. They give us a timeframe for the setting of each chapter, or perhaps something in the character's own words, or perhaps a letter from something outside the story, such as a doctor or the IRS. The book lacks the continuity that a plot-driven novel would provide, but that is not to say nothing happens. Neither is it a collection of short stories. Readers of my reviews know I prefer characterization and I feel this is as much the characterization of a family as that of a person.
The ridge of muscle that supported her lower lip was as stiff as wood.Loyal he sees his mother with dinner already on the table he comes into the house in the evening. The main character of Postcards is Loyal Blood, a man who wants nothing but to be a farmer, to live close to the land, to nurture and care for it. It is not to be. Yet it is this innate understanding of the way the natural world works that sustains him throughout his wandering life.
Yes, Loyal is the central character, but it was his mother's voice that I heard.
You couldn't get away from troubles. They came dragging into the mirror with you, fanning over the snow, filled the dirty sink. Men couldn't imagine women's lives, they seemed to believe, as in a religion, that women were numbed by an instinctive craving to fill the wet mouths of babies, predestined to choose always the petty points of life on which to hang their attention until at last all ended and began with the orifices of the body. She had believed this herself. And wondered in the blue nights if what she truly felt now was not the pleasure of driving but being cast free of Mink's furious anger. He had crushed her into a corner of life.Time to go add her Wyoming Stories to my Wish List.
January 15, 2018
Η δεύτερη, μετά από 8 χρόνια, ανάγνωση των Καρτ ποστάλ επιβεβαίωσε, ή μάλλον ενίσχυσε την άποψή μου ότι το σπουδαίο αυτό βιβλίο είναι γραμμένο με "αίμα καρδιάς" και πρέπει να διαβαστεί ευρέως.
Δυνατή πεζογραφία. Η Proulx συλλαμβάνει τις γήινες φωνές των ανθρώπων μιας παλιότερης Αμερικής, θρηνεί την απώλεια των παλαιών τρόπων του τόπου, θρηνεί την απώλεια του αμερικάνικου ονείρου, θρηνεί την απώλεια μιας ολόκληρης εποχής - όλο το δεύτερο μισό του 20ού αιώνα, που τόσο πλούσια και σκληρά και παραδόξως καθησυχαστικά περιγράφει.
Δυνατή πεζογραφία. Η Proulx συλλαμβάνει τις γήινες φωνές των ανθρώπων μιας παλιότερης Αμερικής, θρηνεί την απώλεια των παλαιών τρόπων του τόπου, θρηνεί την απώλεια του αμερικάνικου ονείρου, θρηνεί την απώλεια μιας ολόκληρης εποχής - όλο το δεύτερο μισό του 20ού αιώνα, που τόσο πλούσια και σκληρά και παραδόξως καθησυχαστικά περιγράφει.
August 25, 2019
Fantastic. The parade of characters that pass through the narrative are so deftly realized. I can’t wait to read more of her work.
January 15, 2015
Wow! I have to give this book 5 stars. Proulx's writing was amazing and engaging, despite the story being about as bleak as possible. Any romantic notions one might have had about rural Vermont living are pretty much ripped to shreds by this story. It follows multiple characters across 40+ years, watching the lives and farm of the Blood family unfold (or implode, depending upon how you look at it.) The oldest son is forced to leave home under circumstances that are never really explained- we know the outcome of what he did, but not why, or how- and that sets in motion a chain of events that will determine the fates of all the other family members. We follow him across the country, through various jobs, watching his life intertwine with multiple colorful characters, most of whom we don't read about for more than a few pages, but who Proulx manages to bring to life with a minimum of prose.
I think the mere fact that there was so little real drama- just the subtle dramas of day to day life, punctuated with tragedy & misfortune- and it was almost 350 pages and the author still kept me hanging on until the last page says more about the book than I could if I wrote an in depth review. I will say, if decay, disease, disaster, poverty, and loneliness are not themes you can sit with, you might want to shy away from this book. I came away from it feeling as full as a several course meal, but I can see where someone who was hoping for reflections on redemption or hope or the resiliency of the human spirit or familial love.....you're likely going to be pretty disappointed, perhaps even deeply dismayed.
Overall, it was long, slow, depressing, dispiriting, and totally enjoyable. Well done.
I think the mere fact that there was so little real drama- just the subtle dramas of day to day life, punctuated with tragedy & misfortune- and it was almost 350 pages and the author still kept me hanging on until the last page says more about the book than I could if I wrote an in depth review. I will say, if decay, disease, disaster, poverty, and loneliness are not themes you can sit with, you might want to shy away from this book. I came away from it feeling as full as a several course meal, but I can see where someone who was hoping for reflections on redemption or hope or the resiliency of the human spirit or familial love.....you're likely going to be pretty disappointed, perhaps even deeply dismayed.
Overall, it was long, slow, depressing, dispiriting, and totally enjoyable. Well done.
May 9, 2012
I am entirely not sure what to make of this book. First and foremost I admire and applaud the author for thinking so far outside the box. I despise novels that tie everything up into a tidy (but absolutely impossible) bow by the end of the book. This one leaves many loose threads, but a thoughtful reader will have enough to make the stories coherent. The characters in this novel grow, learn, and adapt but always stay on pitch. Perhaps the greatest joy in this read is the breadth of place, time and character. It truly is a journey .... Don't treat the postcards at the outset of each chapter as "fluff" they are integral to the story ... Not always the chapter they head up, but integral just the same. If you dislike stories that "leave you hanging" you may want to skip this one.
July 18, 2021
Annie Proulx is my current obsession.
Fourth book in a row. She sets the context of the book in the initial pages ( often you don’t even notice it ) and then as it moves forward the details diverge into multiple occurrences.
Loyal Blood kills his girlfriend and then informs his family that he and his girlfriend are leaving town ( to hide the crime ). The story is shown as one chapter each with a postcard ( each of these don’t seem to have anything directly with the chapter preceding it or the one succeeding ).
Proulx’s method is to induce so much day to day detail in each chapter that we are exposed to minute happenings of the characters more than the relevance to the storyline.
She is indeed amongst the top US fiction writers. Highly recommended
Fourth book in a row. She sets the context of the book in the initial pages ( often you don’t even notice it ) and then as it moves forward the details diverge into multiple occurrences.
Loyal Blood kills his girlfriend and then informs his family that he and his girlfriend are leaving town ( to hide the crime ). The story is shown as one chapter each with a postcard ( each of these don’t seem to have anything directly with the chapter preceding it or the one succeeding ).
Proulx’s method is to induce so much day to day detail in each chapter that we are exposed to minute happenings of the characters more than the relevance to the storyline.
She is indeed amongst the top US fiction writers. Highly recommended
Read
March 12, 2008I'm not sure if I'm enjoying this book or not - it's so bleak and the characters all seem doomed to a horrible end - and are certainly experiencing pretty terrible middles. Nonetheless, it's really well written and my endless optimism leaves me hoping that something amazing will happen for the characters.
June 22, 2020
It doesn't tie things up for the reader at the end. A vivid, moving and poignant book- reminds me of growing up in the country, the stars at night, the feel of loneliness and yearning. I see some of what came into sharper focus later in Brokeback Mountain. I want to know more about what happened to the characters or, more accurately, tell them what came of their family.
June 22, 2010
Yuck. I really didn't like the author's writing style. It was often hard to follow the story line because only vague connections were made and there didn't seem to be a point to the whole book. I skimmed alot of it, hoping to find something interesting, but bah....mostly a waste of time.
September 3, 2019
Ότι και να πω για αυτό το βιβλιο δεν θα μπορέσω να περιγράψω την ομορφιά της γραφής του, το βάθος των χαρακτήρων του και την υπόθεση του που σε αρπάζει από το λαιμό και δεν σε αφήνει να το αφήσεις πριν τελειώσει, κι ας είναι τόσο πικρό. Εξαιρετικό.
June 10, 2025
I found “Postcards” in the little free library, and since I’d read Annie Proulx’s “The Shipping News,” I took it home. Proulx is an excellent writer, and even though it had been several years since I read her other book, bits of it still stuck with me.
Most chapters in “Postcards” start with a drawing of the written side of a postcard. Many of these are written by a main character, others by random people, but each ties in some way to what’s happening in the book.
It follows the Blood family from the 1940s until the 1980s. That’s a long stretch of time, and it felt like it. Although the book was just over 300 pages, the print was small and Proulx’s writing is dense: many times I’d read a sentence and have to re-read it to try to get the idea of just what she was saying. She’s an author that assumes a high level of attention and thinking from her readers, and there were still many times when I wasn’t quite sure what was going on. More than once I wished she had had a bit less faith in her readers and had made things a bit more clear. But, I just went with it, knowing from past experience that she would make the experience worthwhile.
As the book begins, oldest son Loyal Blood (I watched a video of the author where she mentioned often having trouble remembering characters’ names in books, so she’d decided to make hers quirky and memorable) has just buried his girlfriend on the family farm in Vermont, secretly: we’re never told exactly what has happened. He leaves the farm where he was expected to stay for life, and in the years to come the farm (and family) struggles. Son Dub is “slow,” messy, and accident-prone. Daughter Mernelle ends up marrying a “lonely hearts prisoner” whose advertisement she reads. It’s an ill-advised match that works out better than you’d think. I felt a lot for the mom, Jewell, here bemoaning the changes she’s seen: “‘Life don’t go on, not like it used to. What we need is some help in straightenin’ out this mess. The insurance company and the bank fellows come up here every day. He left us in a terrible pickle (her husband had committed suicide). No money, nowhere to go, the boys gone. It used to be your boys would go into farmin’ somewheres nearby. The young ones start out in farmin’ the older men would give ’em a hand. But now. If you can’t help us find a way out I don’t know what I am going to do.’ She snuffled and wept a little against the urgent swamp trill. Her fingers laced through each other. Her wedding ring was worn to the thinness of a wire. ‘Ah, I dunno. When I was a girl there were so many aunts and uncles, cousins, in-laws, second cousins. All of ’em livin’ right around here. They’d be here now, that kind of big fam’ly if it was them times. The men would put the plant tables together. Every woman would bring something, I don’t care, biscuits, fried chicken, pies, potato salad, berry pies, they’d bring these things if it was a get-together or a church picnic or times of trouble. The kids go runnin’ around, laughin’, I can remember the mothers tryin’ to hush them up at my brother Marvin’s funeral, but they’d just slow down for a little bit and then start up again. And here we sit, the three of us. And that’s all.” I think most of us can relate to that, to some extent.
Throughout, there was Proulx’s mesmerizing writing. For instance, Loyal contemplates the consequences of his leaving the farm: “The price for getting away. No wife, no family, no children, no human comfort in the quotidian unfolding of his life.” I love the word quotidian and would like to start using it from time to time 🙂
The book kept giving me “Grapes of Wrath” vibes, with frequent short chapters titled “What I Saw” describing some interlude of nature, usually. I remember my high school lit teacher calling these “inter chapters” in GoW; I remember one about a turtle. I didn’t really get the significance of them then and I still don’t, but I trust Proulx.
Loyal wanders across the western US, digging dinosaur bones, working in a mine, taking up odd jobs here and there: forever a wanderer and I felt bad for him. We see frequent scenes of him enjoying children, and you wish he’d had a chance to have some of his own.
Again, I felt for mom Jewell as she’d receive a postcard from son Loyal maybe once a year, but never with an address so she had no way to contact him. When her husband Mink commits suicide, “she wondered in the blue nights if what she truly felt now was not the pleasure of driving but being cast free of Mink’s furious anger. He had crushed her into a corner of life” (Jewell learned to drive after Mink’s death, and it was both a good and a bad thing for her). “‘Look how good Jewell’s caught on,’ (a fellow worker) said in front of the others. Jewell couldn’t think how long it had been since someone said a word of praise to her. She’d gone red and trembly when they all looked at her, thought of Marvin, the dead brother, telling her she was a smart little kid because she’d found his homemade baseball, hide stitched over a knob of rubber bands, in the long grass after he’d given up. She couldn’t have been older than four.”
If you enjoy literary fiction and are up for a bit of a fiction-reading challenge, with great writing, give “Postcards” a try.
Most chapters in “Postcards” start with a drawing of the written side of a postcard. Many of these are written by a main character, others by random people, but each ties in some way to what’s happening in the book.
It follows the Blood family from the 1940s until the 1980s. That’s a long stretch of time, and it felt like it. Although the book was just over 300 pages, the print was small and Proulx’s writing is dense: many times I’d read a sentence and have to re-read it to try to get the idea of just what she was saying. She’s an author that assumes a high level of attention and thinking from her readers, and there were still many times when I wasn’t quite sure what was going on. More than once I wished she had had a bit less faith in her readers and had made things a bit more clear. But, I just went with it, knowing from past experience that she would make the experience worthwhile.
As the book begins, oldest son Loyal Blood (I watched a video of the author where she mentioned often having trouble remembering characters’ names in books, so she’d decided to make hers quirky and memorable) has just buried his girlfriend on the family farm in Vermont, secretly: we’re never told exactly what has happened. He leaves the farm where he was expected to stay for life, and in the years to come the farm (and family) struggles. Son Dub is “slow,” messy, and accident-prone. Daughter Mernelle ends up marrying a “lonely hearts prisoner” whose advertisement she reads. It’s an ill-advised match that works out better than you’d think. I felt a lot for the mom, Jewell, here bemoaning the changes she’s seen: “‘Life don’t go on, not like it used to. What we need is some help in straightenin’ out this mess. The insurance company and the bank fellows come up here every day. He left us in a terrible pickle (her husband had committed suicide). No money, nowhere to go, the boys gone. It used to be your boys would go into farmin’ somewheres nearby. The young ones start out in farmin’ the older men would give ’em a hand. But now. If you can’t help us find a way out I don’t know what I am going to do.’ She snuffled and wept a little against the urgent swamp trill. Her fingers laced through each other. Her wedding ring was worn to the thinness of a wire. ‘Ah, I dunno. When I was a girl there were so many aunts and uncles, cousins, in-laws, second cousins. All of ’em livin’ right around here. They’d be here now, that kind of big fam’ly if it was them times. The men would put the plant tables together. Every woman would bring something, I don’t care, biscuits, fried chicken, pies, potato salad, berry pies, they’d bring these things if it was a get-together or a church picnic or times of trouble. The kids go runnin’ around, laughin’, I can remember the mothers tryin’ to hush them up at my brother Marvin’s funeral, but they’d just slow down for a little bit and then start up again. And here we sit, the three of us. And that’s all.” I think most of us can relate to that, to some extent.
Throughout, there was Proulx’s mesmerizing writing. For instance, Loyal contemplates the consequences of his leaving the farm: “The price for getting away. No wife, no family, no children, no human comfort in the quotidian unfolding of his life.” I love the word quotidian and would like to start using it from time to time 🙂
The book kept giving me “Grapes of Wrath” vibes, with frequent short chapters titled “What I Saw” describing some interlude of nature, usually. I remember my high school lit teacher calling these “inter chapters” in GoW; I remember one about a turtle. I didn’t really get the significance of them then and I still don’t, but I trust Proulx.
Loyal wanders across the western US, digging dinosaur bones, working in a mine, taking up odd jobs here and there: forever a wanderer and I felt bad for him. We see frequent scenes of him enjoying children, and you wish he’d had a chance to have some of his own.
Again, I felt for mom Jewell as she’d receive a postcard from son Loyal maybe once a year, but never with an address so she had no way to contact him. When her husband Mink commits suicide, “she wondered in the blue nights if what she truly felt now was not the pleasure of driving but being cast free of Mink’s furious anger. He had crushed her into a corner of life” (Jewell learned to drive after Mink’s death, and it was both a good and a bad thing for her). “‘Look how good Jewell’s caught on,’ (a fellow worker) said in front of the others. Jewell couldn’t think how long it had been since someone said a word of praise to her. She’d gone red and trembly when they all looked at her, thought of Marvin, the dead brother, telling her she was a smart little kid because she’d found his homemade baseball, hide stitched over a knob of rubber bands, in the long grass after he’d given up. She couldn’t have been older than four.”
If you enjoy literary fiction and are up for a bit of a fiction-reading challenge, with great writing, give “Postcards” a try.
June 23, 2022
Μια μοναχική πορεία. Μια καταθλιπτική ιστορία. Δεν μου αρέσουν οι στενοχωρες ιστορίες. Ήθελα άλλο τέλος. Ήθελα έστω να βρεθεί ξανά με την οικογένεια..... υπάρχουν και αυτές οι ζωές βεβαια, αλλα την απαισιοδοξία θέλω να την αποφεύγω στο διάβασμα
Μετά από ώρες... είναι ακόμη μαζι μου ο λογιαλ μπλαντ.....
Νομίζω το αδίκησα το βιβλίο. Οι ήρωες της Πρού είναι ολοζώντανοι. Τους συμπαθείς χωρίς να το αξίζουν πάντα. Εκτός από το "κακο" τέλος, για μένα, η όλη περιήγηση του Λόιαλ με αποσυντονισε γιατί δεν είχα πρόσβαση στο χάρτη των ΗΠΑ. Ένα αστέρι ακόμα θα το προσθέσω
Μετά από ώρες... είναι ακόμη μαζι μου ο λογιαλ μπλαντ.....
Νομίζω το αδίκησα το βιβλίο. Οι ήρωες της Πρού είναι ολοζώντανοι. Τους συμπαθείς χωρίς να το αξίζουν πάντα. Εκτός από το "κακο" τέλος, για μένα, η όλη περιήγηση του Λόιαλ με αποσυντονισε γιατί δεν είχα πρόσβαση στο χάρτη των ΗΠΑ. Ένα αστέρι ακόμα θα το προσθέσω
September 10, 2023
Questo libro siede accanto a Ruthie Fear e A volte una bella pensata. Libri che coinvolgono un’intera esistenza, un’intera famiglia, un’intera comunità e abbracciano con il loro arco temporale cambiamenti profondi della società americana. Loyal Blood si macchia di un peccato imperdonabile e abbandona la fattoria di famiglia nel Vermont; il suo vagabondare lo porta da una costa all’altra avanti e indietro ogni volta perdendo un pezzetto di se stesso fino a perdere anche il nome e diventare l’Uomo col Cappello. Le cartoline che spedisce a casa sono a senso unico, senza risposta, chi rimane sarà ancora lí a riceverle? Microstoria e macrostoria si intrecciano tra cambiamenti e spostamenti, dove c’era la fattoria cosa rimane?
March 21, 2024
3.5*
Lots to like, the writing is at times brilliant, but as well, there's others writing this sort of slice of Americana which appeals to me a little more. Not sure why exactly. Very good, without wowing me to the levels of McCarthy, Gay or Pollock.
Lots to like, the writing is at times brilliant, but as well, there's others writing this sort of slice of Americana which appeals to me a little more. Not sure why exactly. Very good, without wowing me to the levels of McCarthy, Gay or Pollock.
May 28, 2023
I only gave this three stars because it was so dark and depressing. The writing is excellent. And I would recommend it to anyone who is a fan of Proulx. But it left me feeling sad.
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