Alden Mudge

FictionLiterary FictionFamily Drama

Ask Again, Yes

Review by Alden Mudge

Mary Beth Keane’s well-wrought, emotionally affecting third novel, Ask Again, Yes, chronicles the lives of two neighboring working-class families over the course of four decades.

In the early 1970s, Francis Gleason, an immigrant from Ireland, and Brian Stanhope attend the New York City police academy together and are paired in field training. Francis quickly marries Anne, a nurse and Irish immigrant. Brian marries Lena, the daughter of Polish and Italian immigrants. Though their career trajectories are different, within a year or two, Francis and Brian end up as neighbors in a suburban town about 20 miles north of New York.

The families are not close. In fact, Anne is unstable and aggressively antisocial. But Brian and Anne’s only son, Peter, and Francis and Lena’s youngest daughter, Kate, develop an extraordinary bond. When Peter and Kate are in eighth grade, Anne commits an act of violence that rips both families apart.

All of this happens within the first quarter of Ask Again, Yes. The rest of the beautifully observed story is about the course of Peter’s and Kate’s lives—and through them, their families’—as they find and lose and find each other again. Not surprisingly, it is a fraught journey, shadowed by the dark bruises of their histories. Time, it seems, does not heal all wounds. But it does heal some. To say much more would betray a narrative that holds many surprises, large and small.

Keane sets her story among seemingly regular people in a normal-seeming American suburb. But Ask Again, Yes is a tale that will compel readers to think deeply about the ravages of unacknowledged mental illness, questions of family love and loyalty and the arduous journey toward healing and forgiveness.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read a Q&A with Mary Beth Keane for Ask Again, Yes.

Mary Beth Keane’s well-wrought, emotionally affecting third novel, Ask Again, Yes, chronicles the lives of two neighboring working-class families over the course of four decades.

NonfictionAmerican History

The British Are Coming

Review by Alden Mudge

Six years ago, Rick Atkinson published The Guns at Last Light, the final volume of his brilliant, award-winning Liberation Trilogy, a narrative history of Americans in combat during World War II. This month, Atkinson returns with The British Are Coming, the first volume of the Revolution Trilogy, a history of the American Revolutionary War. This book is, in a word, fantastic. It offers all the qualities that we have come to expect from the author: deep and wide research, vivid detail, a blend of voices from common soldiers to commanders, blazing characterizations of the leading personalities within the conflict and a narrative that flows like a good novel.

The British Are Coming begins in 1775 with the lead-up to the battles of Lexington and Concord and ends in January 1777 after the battles of Trenton and Princeton. Many of us have heard of these places, and some of us have visited them. One of the many virtues of Atkinson’s skill as a researcher and writer is that he is able to strip away contemporary accretions and give readers a tactile sense of those times and lands.

Few of the Founding Fathers appear in these pages; they are off in Philadelphia writing their declarations and acts of the Continental Congress. But Ben Franklin, nearing 70, makes an arduous winter journey to Quebec as the Americans try and disastrously fail to split Canada away from Great Britain. Then there is Henry Knox, an overweight bookseller who turns out to be a brilliant artillery strategist. And the brothers Howe, leaders of the British Army and Navy, waver between punishing their enemies and treating them lightly to coax them back into the arms of the mother country. 

Towering above them all is George Washington, famous for his physical grace and horsemanship. During much of this time, he is such a failure that some officers plot against him, and he fears being dismissed as the military leader. Under his leadership, the army retreats again and again and again. The enemy mocks Washington, ironically calling him “the old fox.” He must beg soldiers to stay when their enlistments expire. He endures.

One of this book’s great achievements is that it gives readers the visceral sense of just how much the American forces endured. It’s moving to read accounts from soldiers who slept on the snow and frozen ground with their bare feet to a fire, then rose and marched without shoes or jackets to cross the icy Delaware River on Christmas night 1776 to rout British-paid mercenaries in Trenton. The British Are Coming is a superb ode to the grit and everyday heroism that eventually won the war.

The British Are Coming is a superb ode to the grit and everyday heroism that eventually won the war.

NonfictionHistory

Cities

Review by Alden Mudge

There’s much to wonder about in archaeologist Monica L. Smith’s thought-provoking, capacious, often witty new book, Cities: The First 6,000 Years. Why is it, for example, that in the very long history of the human species, cities—beginning with Tell Brak in Mesopotamia—are only 6,000 years old? What confluence of events helped urbanism arise at roughly the same time in many different places? And why are cities here to stay?

That is only the beginning of my questions. An archaeologist and professor of anthropology at UCLA, Smith has excavated ancient sites around the world and brings her wide and deep experience to her perspective on urbanism. Throughout her engaging book, she also affords the casual reader a glimpse of the tools and techniques of her trade.

Cities, Smith posits, were our first internet. They offered connectivity. They required dense, migratory populations where unfamiliarity became a measure of human relations. They also needed diverse economies and ritual buildings like churches. They were defined by verticality and a different scale of human experience than was available to rural populations. If that is obvious, less so are Smith’s ideas about consumption. In a chapter called “The Harmony of Consumption,” she asserts that “trash is an affirming badge of affluence” and digs among ancient trash heaps—surprising for their density of castoff human-made things—to prove it.

In other chapters, again drawing on her knowledge of ancient civilizations, she notes the vital importance of infrastructure. She observes that someone had to manage these projects: dams, pyramids, city grids, water supplies and trash removal. She describes these projects and project managers in surprisingly, almost shockingly contemporary terms. Can it be that ancient city-dwellers were not so different from 21st-century urbanites? Cities, it seems, have always required a level of middle managers and technocrats. Then, as now, there was a population of people from different backgrounds, vitally concerned with the nuts and bolts of life.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read a Q&A with Monica L. Smith for Cities.

An archaeologist and professor of anthropology at UCLA, Monica L. Smith has excavated ancient sites around the world and brings her wide and deep experience to her perspective on urbanism. Throughout her engaging book, she also affords the casual reader a glimpse of the tools and techniques of her trade.

FictionHistorical Fiction

Outside Looking In

Review by Alden Mudge

Recent bestselling nonfiction books by Ayelet Waldman and Michael Pollan suggest that psychedelic drugs are poised to once again transform the zeitgeist. Could it be that we’re about to re-enter that buoyant experimental phase in which we look to psychedelics to unlock our spiritual and psychological prisons?

T.C. Boyle’s captivating 17th novel, Outside Looking In, takes the reader back to a similar moment in the early 1960s when LSD emerged from Timothy Leary’s and Richard Alpert’s experimental psychology labs at Harvard to quickly become the fuel for the transcontinental party bus of novelist Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters—after which tripping became the coming-of-age ritual of a generation. The novel follows the well documented history of Tim, Dick and a coterie of grad students and followers as they travel—prodded along by frowning academic and legal authorities—from Harvard to Mexico to a 64-room mansion in Millbrook, north of New York City.

At its center is the fictional Loney family. Fitzhugh, “Fitz,” is a psychology grad student who has drawn Leary as his academic adviser; Fitz’s wife, Joanie, dropped out of college to support his career and have their child, Corey, now in his teens. They, especially Fitz, are outsiders at first. But they move into the group’s inner circle and experience the magic of its experiment along with its fraying edges.

Boyle, who apparently had his own days of wild and weird, is insightful and sometimes humorous in depicting the allure and chaos of attempting to live communally under the egocentric leadership of Timothy Leary, expand the individual and group mind through psychedelics, find God or not, and go deep into spiritual and physical love with people who are not necessarily legal partners. The novel vividly conveys what was seductively tactile, profound and sometimes scary about this moment in time.

But in the end, Outside Looking In offers a cautionary tale. A contemporary reader will wonder, for example, why in this communal paradise is it only women who cook and clean? And more importantly, after the party, what comes next?

Recent bestselling nonfiction books by Ayelet Waldman and Michael Pollan suggest that psychedelic drugs are poised to once again transform the zeitgeist. Could it be that we’re about to re-enter that buoyant experimental phase when we look to psychedelics to unlock our spiritual and psychological prisons?

NonfictionTrue CrimeSocial Science

Say Nothing

Review by Alden Mudge

Jean McConville was 38 years old in December 1972 when a masked man kidnapped her from her flat in a bleak housing project in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Her 10 children, some of whom were clinging to her legs as she was dragged from her home, never saw her again. It was soon rumored that McConville, a Protestant once married to a Catholic, had been snatched—and probably executed—by the outlawed provisional wing of the Irish Republican Army because she was an informer.

So begins Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland, The New Yorker staff writer Patrick Radden Keefe’s gripping, revelatory and unsettling account of McConville’s murder and its reverberations throughout the 30-year spasm of violence known as the “troubles,” which left 3,500 dead in its wake. To tell the story, Keefe delves into a long and devastating history of open and hidden conflict, parts of which remain entombed within the IRA’s code of silence. With visceral detail, he describes life in the embattled neighborhoods, where suspicion and betrayal festered on all sides. Keefe also offers compelling portraits of some of the leading figures in the conflict, among them Gerry Adams, who helped broker the 1998 Good Friday Agreement that brought an end to armed conflict. He went on to preside over Sinn Féin, sometimes called the political arm of the IRA.

But the most riveting figure in this narrative is Dolours Price. She and her younger sister, Marian, were radicalized as students after a peaceful march for union with Ireland was violently attacked. Described as having a quick tongue, flaming red hair and a peacock personality, she was chosen by Adams for an elite squad. She played a part in McConville’s abduction, organized a car bombing attack on London and, when imprisoned, led a hunger strike that inflamed the romantic revolutionary imagination. But as a true believer, she, along with others, was devastated when Adams first denied that he was ever in the IRA and then brokered a peace agreement that did not include the unification of Ireland. She was, allegedly, not an inherently violent person, and she was left wondering what it was all for. Which is one of the most profound and unanswerable questions this searing book will leave in a reader’s mind.

The New Yorker staff writer Patrick Radden Keefe's gripping, revelatory and unsettling account of McConville's murder and its reverberations throughout the 30-year spasm of violence known as the troubles; which left 3,500 dead in its wake.
NonfictionHistory

Midnight in Chernobyl

Review by Alden Mudge

One weird feature of the little-understood phenomenon of radiation poisoning is that after the initial acute nausea, there is a latency period when many people feel OK. The Soviet soldiers under Captain “Moose” Zborovsky, for example, were able to slosh around for an hour in potentially lethal, gamma-emitting water while they desperately repaired the ruptured drainage under the melting core of Chernobyl’s Reactor Four, and at the time merely felt “exhausted, with an odd taste of sour apples in their mouths.”

Were these men heroic, servile, foolhardy or ignorant? This is one of many questions that will swirl in the minds of readers of Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World’s Greatest Nuclear Disaster, Adam Higginbotham’s spellbinding book about the April 1986 nuclear explosion at Chernobyl. Based on nearly 80 interviews with survivors and a deep dive into declassified Soviet documents, this account pulses with the human dramas that unfolded as people, including more than half a million conscripts, contended with the deadly explosion and its aftermath.

Midnight in Chernobyl also offers profound insights into the failing Soviet system as Mikhail Gorbachev tried to save it with “a new openness.” Despite the new policy, there was much the aging bureaucracy could not readily admit. In a competition with the West, the Soviets had supersized their reactors and, it turns out, deployed a flawed design. A push for speedy construction led to shortcuts and substandard materials. Yet, in what would be the last show-trial of the flagging regime, the explosion was blamed on operator error, and the plant director, knowing the script, went to prison without protest. The Soviets also failed to track the effects of radiation on the many people who worked in the contaminated zone, so to this date, the lethal legacy of the blast is not fully known. Growing public awareness of the cover-up contributed to distrust and the eventual collapse of the regime.

This is an excellent, enthralling account of the disaster and its fallout.

 

This article was originally published in the February 2019 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Adam Higginbotham’s spellbinding book about the April 1986 nuclear explosion at Chernobyl. Based on nearly 80 interviews with survivors and a deep dive into declassified Soviet documents, this account pulses with the human dramas that unfolded as people, including more than half a million conscripts, contended with the deadly explosion and its aftermath.

NonfictionFood & Drink

Milk!

Review by Alden Mudge

Have you ever tried donkey’s milk? Probably not. But according to Mark Kurlansky’s fact-rich Milk!, donkey’s milk is probably closest in consistency and composition to human breast milk. How cows came to predominate our consumption of milk is just one of the many thumbnail histories Kurlansky packs into his fascinating new book.

India is now the world’s largest milk producer, not just because of the sacred cow but also because Indians process and consume milk from water buffalo. And would you believe that China, long thought to be a country of lactose-intolerant people, is the number three producer of milk?

Only about 40 percent of humans can digest milk as adults. For the rest, Kurlansky explains, after weaning, a gene shuts down the ability to process milk. “In truth, the aberrant condition is being able to drink milk,” he writes. But then there is cheese, which for most humans escapes genetic determinism. There is also butter, yogurt and “everyone’s favorite milk,” ice cream, all described vividly here.

Kurlansky divides his book into three parts. The first is a history of the domestication of milk and its byproducts. That narrative flows down many byways. Did you know that French butter makes better pastry than American butter because it contains more fat and less water? Part two is about health safety issues regarding milk—think pasteurization and refrigeration—as production moved from milkmaids to milk machines. And part three is a contemporary world tour of milk production and its unusual products—butter artists in Tibet, for example, or isolated cheese makers in Greece.

Every chapter of Milk! entrances with I-did-not-know-that facts and observations. The book also includes 126 milk-based recipes that Kurlansky thinks are tastiest. His own childhood favorite? Creamed potato leek soup, or vichyssoise.

Early in the book, Kurlansky says that milk is “the most argued-over food in human history.” A skeptical reader will wonder, but in the end, they will likely be convinced of this statement’s truth.

 

This article was originally published in the May 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Have you ever tried donkey’s milk? Probably not. But according to Mark Kurlansky’s fact-rich Milk!, donkey’s milk is probably closest in consistency and composition to human breast milk. How cows came to predominate our consumption of milk is just one of the many thumbnail histories Kurlansky packs into his fascinating new book.

FictionLiterary Fiction

Woman behind bars

Review by Alden Mudge

BookPage Top Pick in Fiction, May 2018

Much of the action of Rachel Kushner’s brilliant new novel is set in California prisons. She has done her research, and the novel is filled with distressing factual details like death-row inmates sewing sandbags and prison staff using a powerful, probably toxic disinfectant called Cell Block 64. And of course there are the stultifying, dehumanizing prison routines.

But the moral scope of The Mars Room is really too large for it to be considered a prison novel. Through its vividly rendered characters, it asks the reader to ponder bigger questions—Dostoyevskian questions—about the system of justice, the possibility of redemption and even the industrialization of the natural landscape.

The novel’s central character is Romy Hall. We meet her as she is being transported from a Los Angeles jail to Stanville, a prison in California’s agricultural heartland where she is to serve two life sentences. She is 29, born to a cruel mother in a San Francisco neighborhood that bears little resemblance to the high-tech mecca of today. She is the mother of a young son she worries about obsessively. Until she fled a stalker by moving with her son to Los Angeles, she hustled as a lap dancer at a place called the Mars Room in downtown San Francisco. We don’t learn the details until late in the novel, but we know that because of her ineffectual lawyer, she ends up in prison for killing her stalker.

Kushner (Telex from Cuba, The Flamethrowers) is both tough and darkly funny in writing about her characters’ situations, and she writes not so much for us to empathize with them, but rather to understand them. The Mars Room is a captivating and beautiful novel.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read a Q&A with Kushner for The Mars Room.

This article was originally published in the May 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Much of the action of Rachel Kushner’s brilliant new novel is set in California prisons. She has done her research, and the novel is filled with distressing factual details like death-row inmates sewing sandbags and prison staff using a powerful, probably toxic disinfectant called Cell Block 64. And of course there are the stultifying, dehumanizing prison routines.

NonfictionHistory

The conquest, revised

Review by Alden Mudge

In the traditional story of the conquest of Mexico, as told by the conquistadors themselves, the brilliant strategist Hernando Cortés and a small, valiant band of Spanish conquistadors marched into the capital of the Aztec empire, Tenochtitlan (where Mexico City now stands), on November 8, 1519. They were met by a weak and fearful Montezuma, who almost immediately surrendered his empire to the Spaniards. Montezuma was later stoned to death by his own people, and a war broke out in which the Spaniards were soon victorious. That a small band of conquistadors could defeat a massive army of Mesoamerican warriors proved the superiority of Western culture. For the next 500 years, the epic tale was embellished, streamlined and repeated so often that it assumed the aura of truth.

In his brilliant deep dive into the history and scholarship about this famous episode, Matthew Restall contests almost every assertion in the traditional account of the conquest of the Aztec empire. Restall is emphatic and witty in his argument that Montezuma did not surrender; the assumption that he did was the result of ignorance about the subtleties of the native language. Restall credibly argues that as the shrewd leader of a very advanced civilization, Montezuma was neither weak nor fearful. Nor was Cortés particularly brilliant, as his earlier career shows, and he was less in control of his comrades than he claimed. The conquistadors also benefited immensely from internal rivalries among the Aztecs and other Mesoamericans, and the catastrophic spread of disease.

Through diligent research, Restall presents readers with a fascinating view of Montezuma, mounting a convincing argument that Cortés’ self-serving accounts and the traditional narrative are almost surely false.

 

This article was originally published in the February 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Through diligent research, Restall presents readers with a fascinating view of Montezuma, mounting a convincing argument that Cortés’ self-serving accounts and the traditional narrative are almost surely false.

FictionLiterary FictionHistorical Fiction

Where the water takes her

Review by Alden Mudge

BookPage Top Pick in Fiction, October 2017

In the wake of her dazzling Pulitzer Prize winner, A Visit from the Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan’s deftly plotted new novel, Manhattan Beach, is a surprise. Where A Visit is a stylistically adventurous exploration of the American punk rock music scene that adopts a form of storytelling somewhere between a novel and a collection of short stories, Manhattan Beach is a big, twisty, traditional novel set during the Depression and World War II.

As the novel opens, 11-year-old Anna Kerrigan accompanies her father, Eddie, a Brooklyn dockworker and small-time bagman, on a mysterious visit to Dexter Styles’ Manhattan Beach mansion. Styles has one foot in the legitimate business world and the other in the underworld. Until her father’s visit with Styles, Anna has been his constant companion; after the visit, her father becomes more distant and more a denizen of late nights in faraway places. After several years, Eddie simply disappears. One strand of the remainder of the novel concerns Anna’s poignant efforts to discover the fate of her father, which eventually brings her deeper into the orbit of the elusive Styles.

At the same time, Anna becomes the sole supporter for her mother and her disabled sister. She finds wartime work in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. There she becomes fascinated by the deep-sea divers who work underwater to repair war ships, a profession closed to women. But because this is wartime and there is a shortage of men, Anna manages through sheer determination and grit to take on this treacherous work and to develop a skill that will later help in her search for her father.

Egan writes with great skill and illustrative power. Particularly beautiful are her descriptions of the sea and its mesmerizing effects on her characters. In her afterword, Egan describes the vast amount of research she did on the World War II-era Brooklyn Navy Yard, and it shows. Her portrayals of life in the yard and the perils and mechanics of the work of divers are marvels to behold.

 

This article was originally published in the October 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

In the wake of her dazzling Pulitzer Prize winner, A Visit from the Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan’s deftly plotted new novel, Manhattan Beach, is a surprise. Where A Visit is a stylistically adventurous exploration of the American punk rock music scene that adopts a form of storytelling somewhere between a novel and a collection of short stories, Manhattan Beach is a big, twisty, traditional novel set during the Depression and World War II.

NonfictionTravel

Identity and the land

Review by Alden Mudge

BookPage Top Pick in Nonfiction, December 2016

If you’re thinking about building a very big wall, why not start by reading Rory Stewart’s captivating new book, The Marches: A Borderland Journey between England and Scotland. In its first section, Stewart describes walking—occasionally accompanied by his then 89-year-old father—along Hadrian’s Wall, which the Romans built in Northern England to keep out the barbarians. A student of the wall’s history, Stewart knows that it was for centuries garrisoned by a remarkably diverse set of soldiers and their families, including “Tigris barge-men from Iraq.” What, then, does it really mean to be a Briton, a Scot or an Englishman?

At the time of Stewart’s first walk along the thousand-mile length of the border, Scotland was about to hold a referendum on whether to leave the United Kingdom. A vote to leave would mean that Stewart, recently elected to Parliament from a district in Northern England, and his father, Brian, a proud Scottish Highlander who has spent his career working for the British Empire, would live in different nations.

The meaning and history of borders and national identities is something he ponders during a longer walk recounted in the second section of the book. Stewart, who wrote about his 2002 walk across Afghanistan in the brilliant bestseller The Places in Between, has complicated, sometimes contradictory experiences, all framed by encounters with people who live in the Marches. He longs for the bucolic landscapes described by Wordsworth and is disillusioned by the wilder landscapes that environmentalists have succeeded in restoring. Which of these is the real English landscape? It seems to depend on when you start your timeline.

Time is one of the chief concerns of the third and final section of the book, because at 93 years of age, Stewart’s father is dying. Stewart writes movingly and honestly about his father, who was 50 when Rory was born but possessed a remarkable vigor and a keen interest in his son that readers will feel throughout the narrative. It’s a fitting end to this powerful exploration of personal and national lineages and landscapes.

 

This article was originally published in the December 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

If you’re thinking about building a very big wall, why not start by reading Rory Stewart’s captivating new book, The Marches: A Borderland Journey between England and Scotland. In its first section, Stewart describes walking—occasionally accompanied by his then 89-year-old father—along Hadrian’s Wall, which the Romans built in Northern England to keep out the barbarians. A student of the wall’s history, Stewart knows that it was for centuries garrisoned by a remarkably diverse set of soldiers and their families, including “Tigris barge-men from Iraq.” What, then, does it really mean to be a Briton, a Scot or an Englishman?
NonfictionEssays

A poet’s longstanding love of nature

Review by Alden Mudge

Most of the 18 brief, beautiful essays in Upstream have appeared individually in other collections by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Mary Oliver. Gathered together here, these prose works provide an interior roadmap to her development as one of America’s most accomplished—and most popular—poets of nature and transcendence. 

The title essay, for example, is an impressionistic remembrance of straying away from her family as a young child, wandering upstream and becoming lost. Within a few short pages, it becomes an exhilarating celebration of being lost in nature. The essay concludes: “Attention is the beginning of devotion.”

Attention and devotion are what readers have come to expect from Oliver’s poems. The same traits are evident in her prose. In the astonishing “Swoon,” she watches with great curiosity and sympathy as a female spider produces eggs, nurtures her newborns and painstakingly traps a cricket—“with a humped, shrimplike body and whiplike antennae and jumper’s legs”—in her web. Questions arise in her mind about what she is witnessing, and she writes: “I know I can find [answers] in some book of knowledge, of which there are many. But the palace of knowledge is different from the palace of discovery, in which I am, truly, a Copernicus. The world is not what I thought, but different, and more! I have seen it with my own eyes!”

Other essays contemplate her poetic and intellectual forebears—the transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson and poets Walt Whitman, Edgar Allan Poe and William Wordsworth. Still others relate her soulful encounters with nature during her walks in the woods and along the shore near her home in Provincetown, Massachusetts. These places have often been sources of inspiration for her poems and will be familiar to many of her readers. So the final essay about leaving Provincetown, nuanced as it is, comes as a shock. 

Oliver, now in her 80s, has moved to Florida. And she remains a joyful advocate for the palace of discovery.

 

This article was originally published in the October 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Most of the 18 brief, beautiful essays in Upstream have appeared individually in other collections by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Mary Oliver. Gathered together here, these prose works provide an interior roadmap to her development as one of America’s most accomplished—and most popular—poets of nature and transcendence.
FictionLiterary Fiction

A saga of love and loss in Canada’s unforgiving wilderness

Review by Alden Mudge

Annie Proulx’s enthralling, multigenerational epic, Barkskins, opens in 1693 in the vast North Woods of New France (now Canada) with the arrival from France of two indentured woodcutters, or “barkskins.” René Sel feels with the first swings of his axe that he is “embarking on his life’s work.” But, blunted hatchet in hand, the ailing Charles Duquet can only nibble at his first tree. Duquet soon flees into the forest, changes his name to Duke and reappears as the canny founder of a Boston-based timber empire. Sel falls in love with a Mi’kmaw woman and fathers three children who mostly view themselves as native people.

The remainder of this 700-plus-page novel follows the lives of the Sel and Duke descendants up until 2013. The story unfolds against a background of social and political upheavals, beginning with the French and Indian war and ending with contemporary environmental conflicts. The Sels struggle to maintain a native culture as the natural world is altered by forces in which, for their own livelihoods, they must participate. The more powerful Duke family, whose timber interests eventually range throughout the world, has its own set of tragedies—and comedies.

Proulx’s human characters—their lives and deaths—are vividly conceived. Her portrayals of them are nuanced. In a recent interview, Proulx said she has been thinking about and researching this book for many years. It shows. Barkskins brims with a granular sense of human experience over a period of 300 years. And like many novels by excellent writers, Barkskins encourages understanding, if not empathy, for characters whose outlooks we might usually dismiss. The idea that the vast forests of North America could never be diminished, for example, is expressed often by her early characters. With hindsight, we scoff at such a notion today. But Proulx allows us to feel the reasonableness and need for such an outlook at the time, making us question our easy assumptions about people of the past.

And yet the most moving and most consistent character of Barkskins is the world’s forests. One of the great achievements of this novel is to create a sort of tragic personality for the environment. Proulx’s beautiful prose renders an exultant view of the life of forest worlds lost to us, in both their grandeur and their indifferent menace. It will be very difficult for someone to finish reading Barkskins without a deep sense of loss.

 

This article was originally published in the July 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Annie Proulx’s enthralling, multigenerational epic, Barkskins, opens in 1693 in the vast North Woods of New France (now Canada) with the arrival from France of two indentured woodcutters, or “barkskins.” René Sel feels with the first swings of his axe that he is “embarking on his life’s work.” But, blunted hatchet in hand, the ailing Charles Duquet can only nibble at his first tree. Duquet soon flees into the forest, changes his name to Duke and reappears as the canny founder of a Boston-based timber empire. Sel falls in love with a Mi’kmaw woman and fathers three children who mostly view themselves as native people.

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