Postcards « Edith Potter

June 4, 2010

Postcards (Scribner Classics)

Filed under: Postcards — Tags: Classics, Postcards, Scribner — rikmbe @ 9:57 am

Postcards (Scribner Classics) Faulkner-like – Kris L. Holt – Plymouth, MN United States
This is a very dark story that makes it hard to swallow that our American existentialism can be that negatively quirky throughout an entire family and those they encountered. But I’m sure American reality has been cruel if you dare to look at some lives as told on Deadwood SD tombstone eulogies.

Decrescendo story starting with a dysfunctional family ending in one long strange trip. Very entertaining where the reader travels with the main character through the passing of time and having lost touch with any essence of family or ascendency or redemption. This reminded me of a Kerouac-like story with a nomadic main character from the Beat Generation.

Perhaps the deadly message or enlightenment is that family dysfunction leads to more misery.

No doubt this book is Faulkner-like, but dear reader, be prepared for a funereal experience. Due to its artistry and clarity, I would award this book five stars, but due my own tastes, I prefer reading something more uplifting and reserve a star for my own redemption and give the four remaining stars.
:

E. Annie Proulx’s first novel, Postcards, winner of the 1993 Pen/Faulkner Award for Fiction, tells the mesmerizing tale of Loyal Blood, who misspends a lifetime running from a crime so terrible that it renders him forever incapable of touching a woman.

Blood’s odyssey begins in 1944 and takes him across the country from his hardscrabble Vermont hill farm to New York, across Ohio, Minnesota, and Montana to British Columbia, on to North Dakota, Wyoming, and New Mexico and ends, today, in California, with Blood homeless and near mad. Along the way, he must live a hundred lives to survive, mining gold, growing beans, hunting fossils and trapping, prospecting for uranium, and ranching. In his absence, disaster befalls his family; greatest among their terrible losses are the hard-won values of endurance and pride that were the legacy of farm people rooted in generations of intimacy with soil, weather, plants, and seasons.

Postcards chronicles the lives of the rural and the dispossessed and charts their territory with the historical verisimilitude and writerly prowess of Cather, Dreiser, and Faulkner. It is a new American classic. Reproduced as graphics that preface narrative sections, the postcards in this novel — communications between the Blood family and their son Loyal, as well as other personal mail and advertising material — progressively reveal the insecurity of the rural Bloods in the changing post-war world. Loyal has fled into exile after an accidental killing, but cannot find a haven of rest. The family patriarch, Mink, writes vitriolic letters to local agricultural agents when the real object of his ire is his absent son. Loyal’s brother sends off for an artificial arm to replace the one he lost in an accident; his sister answers a mail order ad for a husband. Through the mail, Proulx inventively reveals the inchoate longings of a difficult existence in this winner of the 1993 PEN/Faulkner Award.
Postcards (Scribner Classics)

Comments (0)