USA TODAY International Edition
‘ Barkskins’ has an Earth- shattering message
Annie Proulx’s epic novel spans centuries
We often call long novels “ambitious.” Sometimes they’re just long, though. ( When a story goes on forever at a dinner party, the word everyone uses on the ride home is generally a different one: boring.)
Maybe the ambition is ours: If we’re going to commit to the time it demands, we want a big novel to give us the whole intricate sweep of life, life’s recursions, life’s mysteries. Ultimately, perhaps even a glimpse of life’s meaning.
Barkskins ( Scribner, 713 pp., out of four), the new novel by Annie Proulx, is very long and, astonishingly, actually ambitious. It tracks the gradual but ceaseless ravaging of the forests of the New World from 1693 to 2013; its aim is nothing less than a reckoning with the human role in the health of the planet. It succeeds. Proulx’s book begins with two men arriving in Canada ( New France, as it was called) as indentured servants. They find an im- possible natural splendor there, “evergreens taller than cathedrals, cloud- piercing spruce.” One of the men, Rene Sel, works the land honestly, marrying a Mi’kmaw woman. The other, Charles Duquet, disappears, re- emerging after some years as an unscrupulous furrier. What follows is the tale of the dynasties these men establish, with each generation taking something irreplaceable from Earth.
This could be appallingly didactic, but Barkskins is miles from that. That’s because its characters are never one- dimensional — even the worst of them are complex, their greed often driven by insecurity and loss, their individual lives too brief for them to apprehend the full scope of their collective destructiveness. Nobody is at fault; everybody is at fault. The cigarette companies are full of wonderful mothers and fathers.
Much of Proulx’s towering reputation — she has won most of the major American literary prizes — is based on her prose, which is sparky and sinuous, alive with ideas, though occasionally overcooked. Her best previous novel, The Shipping News, was full of bad writing and even more full of good writing. Her Western stories ( Brokeback Mountain is the most famous) are uneven, and some of her novels are genuinely weak.
But Barkskins is masterful, full of an urgent, tense lyricism, its plotting beautifully unexpected, its biographical narratives flowing into one another like the seasons. Proulx is 80, and it’s amazing to behold an author of her age move not toward a smaller scale but a larger one, corralling all of her powers in a vast synthesis. It’s not that Barkskins is perfect — some of the later eras she describes feel rushed and sketchy — but that it’s so consistently vital.
And ambitious. There have been numerous novels with this kind of chronological scope, but they’re almost always primarily historical in purpose, such as James Michener’s and Edward Rutherfurd’s. Proulx, by contrast, has a whole competing host of ethical, conceptual, historical and literary concerns: she wants to de- emphasize the human point of view, draw our eyes out to nature, even as she writes her saga through individual people. The result is a marvel. This is a long novel worth your time.