The life and hard times of a squeeze-box
Caroline Moore
ACCORDION CRIMES by E. Annie Proulx Fourth Estate, £16.99, pp. 381 Many of those who admired E. Annie Proulx's magnificent second novel, The Shipping News, must have rushed off to buy her first, Postcards. They will have found there the same rich ingredients: Proulx's winning eye for the peculiar, her ear for the rhythms of speech, and the blazing vigour of her descriptive prose. At times, however, Postcards tilted towards a sort of American Cold Comfort Farm:
Mink clenched the carving knife, sawed at the ham. The ham smelled like blood. Cold air crawled along the floor, the ferret scur- ried in the wall... 'Pass the plates.' Mink's voice, gone thin since his tractor accident a few years ago, seemed caught in some glottal anatomic trap.
In Postcards, men rarely escape mutilation by machinery, a fiancée dies during pas- sionate intercourse, a grandmother falls through rotten floorboards upon the baby trapped beneath, and cows go down with the Mad Itch.
The deaths come even more thick and fast in Accordion Crimes. E. Annie Proulx's latest novel is the story of a green accor- dion, travelling for 100 years from hand to hand and from ethnic group to ethnic group across America, until it finally meets its own unloved end. This idea for a novel is not immediately appealing: I remember feeling similarly uninspired at school by the essay title 'A Day in the Life of a Penny', though doubtless the young Proulx would have risen to the challenge. It was, after all, our human sympathy for huge misshapen Quoyle with his hellion daughters that made The Shipping News so beguiling. The Shipping News, indeed, was even a sort of love-story — a fable about home-coming, about finding one's roots. Accordion Crimes is about rootlessness, and the terrible 'It'll fit right in with the surroundings — there are spaces here for the homeless to sleep.' human and cultural costs of the melting pot.
Without a human focus — though it's surprising how much Proulx can make one root even for an accordion that seems to bring a jinx upon its owners — Accordion Crimes reads like a series of short stones loosely strung upon a fine thread of history. Death strikes swiftly, even jauntily. Charac- ters die of rattlesnake and spider bites, assassination by stiletto, a goat-gland implant that turns gangrenous, suicide induced by religious mania, electrocution with a worm-probe, impalement in a truck- crash; through being sewn up in a shrinking cow-hide in a desert, beheaded with an axe as an act of euthanasia, or simply as a cazd- sharper 'in a punitive barbed-wire corset'.
If Death has many doors, they open with the farcical speed of a Ben Travers come- dy. Even a roll of Kodak may prove one's undoing: . when Rawley and his wife, Evelyn, cele- brated their 25th wedding anniversary with an autumn trip to Yellowstone Park where Rawley, in the West Thumb Geyser Basin, dropped a roll of film, trod on it, lost his bal- ance and fell headlong into a seething hot spring, and despite eyes parboiled blind and the knowledge of impending death, clam- bered out — leaving the skin of his hands like red gloves on the stony edge — only to fall into another, hotter pool.
Macabre and quirky humour runs through this book. Readers who appreciat- ed the stomach-churning cuisine of The Flying Squid Lunchstop in The Shipping News will enjoy old Mrs Przybysz's scorn of her daughter-in-law,
who thought she was a notable cook because she had taken part in something called the Grand American National Bakeoff, had won a set of aluminium pots with her imitation of a T-bone steak made out of hamburgers and Wheaties, a carved carrot for the bone ... (She made also ... a fish shape from cottage cheese, canned tuna and Jell-O, with a black olive eye.)
Dorothy Przybysz's refusal to learn her mother-in-law's traditional Polish recipes is only one symptom of the cultural costs of assimilation. Almost all the widely varied cast in this book are immigrants (accor- dions, like bagpipes, seem to attract minorities) — Sicilian, German, Cajun, Tex-Mex, French Canadian, Polish and Basque; and they are faced with an impos- sible dilemma. Either they cling to their old ways, their language, their music, their roots, and are persecuted and despised by their neighbours in a world in which Ital- ians hate Sicilians almost as much as whites hate blacks; or they try to assimilate, to shed their racial and national identities. Either way, they are scorned by their own children, the slick and impatient second- generation Americans.
This bleak picture of irredeemable preju- dice and violence is hardly softened: the few of Proulx's characters who do make good have always tended to do so in partic- ularly despicable ways (such as real estate, Which is presented as more or less synony- mous with villainy). Yet even readers with minimal interest In accordions or mutilation will find them- selves bowled along by the sheer virtu- osoenergy of Proulx's depiction of her violently seething, idiosyncratic Great American Nightmare. Her range and scope are tremendous, shuttling through the warp of multiple cultures and span- ning, by the end, 100 years. And it is the range of detail that grips, richly concrete. In a sentence, she can summon up the physical presence of a character — or even a cat: 'immense, squarish and orange, resembling a suitcase, his tail a broken strap.' (Cat-lovers should not inquire about his fate.) She is fascinated by the lit- ter and junk of life, and by the peculiarities of idiom left in remote or specialised pock- ets — whether from the isolated lives of trappers, or the tawdry rhinestone world of accordion competitions. I can only blindly assume that her passionate evocation of the technicalities of accordion music is as accurate as her account of how to trap coy- otes: her prose breeds conviction.
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