Postcards (Scribner Classics) [Hardcover]

Annie Proulx (Author)

Book Description

Series: Scribner Classics | Publication Date: October 1, 1996

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.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

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. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

In this poignant first novel by Proulx ( Heart Songs and Other Stories ), artfully misspelled postcards form the tenuous links between ill-fated young trapper Loyal Blood and his family--Mink and Jewelle, Dub and Mernelle--who eke a meager existence from their ancestral Vermont farm. When Loyal accidentally kills his saucy redheaded sweetheart Billy while making love in the fields, he hides her body in a stone-covered fox den. Abruptly he tells his family that he and Billy are heading west to "make a new start." In a vengeful rage his father Mink shoots Loyal's cows. Loyal endures harsh years of self-imposed exile as, from 1944 to the '80s, he roves from job to job--mining, fossil picking, trapping--each authoritatively detailed. Racked with gagging seizures whenever he tries to touch another woman, sick in his lungs, Loyal doggedly accepts his lot without complaint. Back home the violent, feckless Bloods fall into ruin, attempting arson, serving jail terms and losing the farm, which is sold for trailer parks. Flurries of postcards fly, both personal and commercial: brother Dub answers one for an artificial limb, desperate sister Mernelle responds to a lonely lumberman's ad for a wife. Proulx writes a rich, sensuous prose; she captures the earthy, hard-bitten voices of men and women resigned to travail and documents the passing of an epoch. If there is a fault, it is the overabundance of minor characters randomly introduced into the narrative.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: Scribner (October 1, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0684833689
• ISBN-13: 978-0684833682
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.5 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (68 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #707,542 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Annie Proulx's The Shipping News won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the National Book Award for Fiction, and the Irish Times International Fiction Prize. She is the author of two other novels: Postcards, winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award, and Accordion Crimes. She has also written two collections of short stories, Heart Songs and Other Stories and Close Range. In 2001, The Shipping News was made into a major motion picture. Annie Proulx lives in Wyoming and Newfoundland.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars An absorbing, if somewhat sobering read, September 15, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Postcards (Paperback)

I do admire Annie Proulx's writing, it is the sort that transports you to the setting. If the setting is the amazing Blood farm and the consequent flight therefrom then that's where you go, like it or not. Judging from these reviews, the less articulate amongst us did not like it.... I can't say I enjoyed the book in a lighthearted sense , but I certainly did enjoy it the literary appreciation sense. I found it both difficult to read and difficult to stop. Difficult because of the thread of violence , blood and death that runs through it,particularly as relates to animals. I was brought up in rural setting, but the cruelty and carnage that is farming in bygone Vermont is something else. I was almost reading with a hand partly in front of my eyes, as in a horror movie. (Perhaps Jane Smiley could do an American version of Cold Comfort Farm based on the Blood saga ) An interesting thing I note , also from the other reviews is the different ways in which people interpret the first page killing. I saw it an indubitably a murder,even if the intent was not originally there , others saw it as an accident of some sort. Whatever, the lonely saga of the guilty Loyal Blood is the backbone of the book, and his retribution is slow and complete and even if like me you though him initially guilty and his occupations cruel and unusual, your heart still goes out to him. His parents, the luxuriantly-named, and anything but luxuriantly endowed Jewell and Mink Blood are likewise important characters - at 60-odd Loyal is still loyally writng his postcards to his dead father and absent mother,sister and brother . Do they escape - well you read and find out. I promise you a seriously good read

33 of 40 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Postcards :from the edge of fiction perfection, May 15, 2001

By 

Janice M. Hansen (California United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Postcards (Paperback)

Introduced to Annie Proulx from her book _Shipping News_, I eagerly snatched this book up with the same expectations and I was delivered of that and more. An outstanding story of family, blood lines, history and human strength and frailty, Annie once again strikes gold. Teased, the reader gets little glimpses of mementos, mail, postcards throughout the novel that relate in intriguing ways to the story content. Probably the biggest teaser would be the first few pages. I challenge any lover of literature to read those pages and put the novel back on the shelf. There is simply no way to resist this book when you have read this entry. My analysis of a great work of literature is my intention to reread the novel again. There are a handfull of books I know I will, as the temptation to read something fresh is always greater. This novel will never be lent out, for I will wait until it dims just the slightest in my memory, and then I will seek it out and read it again with as much anticipation as when I read it the first time. I can't wait!!

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars No return address, April 23, 2004

By 

Gary Sprandel (Frankfort, Kentucky) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Postcards (Paperback)

Annie Proulx's first novel uses the vehicle of postcards, often from the main character Loyal Blood, to introduce most chapters. What is striking about the cards is there is never a return address, with Loyal cutting himself off from contact from his family, but still wanting to let them know his whereabouts (with a rack of stolen bear postcards). I was hoping for some return, or public discovery of the event that precipitated Loyals exodus. The descriptions of mining and archeology in the west were perhaps the best, but the writing of the farm in Vermont did not reveal as strong feeling of place. The writing in sometimes very lyrical for example ".. her own house showed up as a slatternly lean of paintless clapboards, the porch slipping away like melting butterscotch". The vignettes almost read more like loosely connected short stories, than a novel. The male characters seem most developed, with the women offering less. Readers of this may enjoy Robert Olen Butler's upcoming book " Had a Good Time : Stories from American Postcards " which has fictional short stories focused around an actual postcard