Word: proulx
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Among this year's Pulitzer prizewinners: Eileen Welsome of the Albuquerque Tribune for her reporting on human radioactivity experiments; William Raspberry for his commentary in the Washington Post; and freelance photographer Kevin Carter for his haunting shot of a tiny Sudanese girl stalked by a vulture. E. Annie Proulx' The Shipping News won the fiction prize and Edward Albee's Three Tall Women won for drama...
...novel called Accordion Crimes, she has already scouted Texas, Chicago and most of New England, with Minnesota and Wisconsin still ahead. This rumbling about the continent might simply be pencil sharpening, the kind of elaborate preparation that writers allow themselves while waiting for mental mists to clear. But for Proulx it works...
...Proulx's early editors, Ed Gray, founder of Gray's Sporting Journal, has things almost exactly right in his analysis of her extreme characters and situations: "She shocks you with them at the beginning and then proceeds to have you ride with them through something you couldn't have imagined them going through, or you going through as a reader, until at the end there is some sort of state of grace that's achieved...
Gray thinks that Proulx's highest gift is for comedy, and he may be right. Or it may be that the darker early stories (collected as Heart Songs) and Postcards are simply too rough to be read comfortably. But The Shipping News is funnier and kindlier than Proulx's other work -- not precisely light in tone, the author says wryly, but "light blue." Though the commotion of being abruptly famous feels "like I've backed into some bizarre machinery," her professional life is blissful now. This is not so much due to the shelfful of literary prizes she has collected...
...okay. "A novel for me was a wonderful feeling. It was like getting into a warm bath and being able to spread out and loll around in these lovely paragraphs and pages of description." Fair warning: a warm, lolling author does not mean that readers and characters will escape Proulx's lash. She assesses the tone of her Accordion Crimes as "black and scarlet...