That Old Ace in the Hole : A Novel [Hardcover]

Annie Proulx (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 10, 2002 | Series: Proulx, E Annie

In "That Old Ace in the Hole," Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner Annie Proulx has written an exhilarating story brimming with language, history, landscape, music, and love. The novel, Proulx's fourth, is told through the eyes of Bob Dollar, a young Denver man trying to make good in a bad world. Dollar is out of college but aimless, and he takes a job with Global Pork Rind -- his task to locate big spreads of land in the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles that can be purchased by the corporation and converted to hog farms.

Dollar finds himself in a Texas town called Woolybucket, whose idiosyncratic inhabitants have ridden out all manner of seismic shifts in panhandle country. These are tough men and women who survived tornadoes and dust storms, and witnessed firsthand the demise of the great cattle ranches. Now it's feed lots, hog farms, and ever-expanding drylands.

Dollar settles into LaVon Fronk's old bunkhouse for fifty dollars a month, helps out at Cy Frease's Old Dog Cafe, targets Ace and Tater Crouch's ranch for Global Pork, and learns the hard way how vigorously the old owners will hold on to their land, even though their children want no part of it.

Robust, often bawdy, strikingly original and intimate, "That Old Ace in the Hole" tracks the vast waves of change that have shaped the American landscape and character over the past century -- and in Bob Dollar, Proulx has created one of the most irresistible characters in contemporary fiction.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Bob Dollar is a reluctant land swindler. When the 25-year-old protagonist in Annie Proulx's That Old Ace in the Hole signs on as a location scout for Global Pork Rind, an industrial hog farming corporation, he has no idea what kind of moral quandaries he's in for. Well, maybe he does. His assignment, after all, is to infiltrate a tiny town in the Texas Panhandle and find a tract of land his employer can turn into an industrial hog farm. Bob tells the locals he's scouting for luxury home developers ("They feel there is potential here"), but as a cover story it's less than clever. Only a fool would build mansions in the godforsaken Panhandle country, a place of light soil, bad wind, killing drought, and end-of-world thunder. "To live here," one Panhandler tells Bob, "it sure helps if you are half cow and half mesquite and all crazy." The narrative follows Bob's hapless quest to ink a deal, but Proulx's mission is bigger than that. She's out to tell the story of the Panhandle itself, to write an entirely new literary territory into existence. With the help of a menagerie of eccentric characters set down in "the most complicated part of North America," Proulx succeeds admirably. --Claire Dederer

From Publishers Weekly

Proulx's people are the hardworking poor who live in bleak, derelict, noisome corners of America where they endure substandard housing, eat bad food and know everybody else's business, going back generations. Most are voluble, in vernacular that sings with regional dialects. All have names that Proulx evidently savors, monikers like LaVon Grace Fronk, Jerky Baum, Habakuk van Melkebeek and Freda Beautyrooms-with personalities to match. The protagonist of her latest novel is the relatively average Bob Dollar (aka Mr. Dime and Mr. Penny), a young man determined to make something of himself, whose boss at the Global Pork Rind corporation, Ribeye Cluke, sends him from Denver to the Texas and Oklahoma panhandle, where he will secretly scout for properties that can be bought for hog farms. As he settles in the town of Wooleybucket, Bob is exposed to the stench that hog farms emit: "a heavy ammoniac stink that burned the eyes and the throat." He also comes to understand the old folks' love of their land, which they've worked through drought, floods, tornadoes and ice storms. Pulitzer Prize-winner Proulx imparts this information with such minute accuracy that it's like seeing a painting up close and magnified, with each tiny brush stroke lovingly emphasized. One grows quite fond of the characters so beset by nature, fate and bizarre accidents, especially old Ace Crouch, a lifelong repairer of windmills, who represents the joke that the title promises. But the novel, which loops ahead and back again in a series of lusty anecdotes, doesn't engage the emotions with the same immediacy as did Postcards and The Shipping News. Readers must settle here for a good story steeped in atmosphere, but not a compelling one.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 384 pages
• Publisher: Scribner; First Edition edition (December 10, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0684813076
• ISBN-13: 978-0684813073
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (67 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #665,758 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

22 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A DEFT AND ABLE READING, December 25, 2002

By 

Gail Cooke (TX, USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (COMMUNITY FORUM 04)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: That Old Ace in the Hole (Audio Cassette)

Arliss Howard, who directed and starred in "Big Bad Love" (2002), gives a deft and able reading to Annie Proulx's latest tale set in the great southwest, the panhandles of Oklahoma and Texas. Howard's take on the slight twang and pacing of voices native to this part of the world is on target.

A Pulitzer Prize winner for "The Shipping News," novelist Proulx can paint a character inside and out with the best of them. Such is the case with our narrator, Bob Dollar, whose parents dropped him on a Colorado doorstep when he was 8-years-old. He grows into manhood a bit unfocused and unchallenged.

Bob does land a paying job with Global Pork Rind, a company that dispatches him to the hinterlands in search of large sections of land, ranches, that can be bought by Global Pork and converted to hog farms. He is cautioned that most take a dim view of hog raisers for neighbors so he must be very circumspect in looking around.

He comes upon Woolybucket, Texas (don't you love that name? Welcome to Woolybucket! But, I digress. No five, four, three, two or even one star motels there, so he rents a dilapidated bunkhouse from a widow, LaVon Fronk, and hires out to Cy Frease, proud proprietor of the Old Dog Café.

There's a lot to be learned for Bob - beyond the historical documents that LaVon has stashed in her house. The locals aren't dweebs or ineffectuals; they're a proud lot who want to hold on to their land no matter what.

Does Bob get their land or does their land get to Bob? Listen to this tale rich in portraits of working class America and see.

- Gail Cooke

29 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Bullseye, December 13, 2002

By 

Candace "thepageturner" (Los Angeles, CA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: That Old Ace in the Hole : A Novel (Hardcover)

Full of zip and twinkle, "That Old Ace in the Hole" marks the return of the Annie Proulx readers relish as opposed to the depressing presenter of "Accordion Crimes" and "Postcards." In this novel, she focuses her sights on the Texas Panhandle, a place of constantly-alarming weather, frequently-alarming characters, and a strange beauty. Young Bob Dollar has the first job is his career, scouting land for a Global Pork Rind hog operation. He is advised to look for god-forsaken places where elderly residents are longing to sell up and move out and whose offspring would not return to the area even if someone held a gun to their heads. But because of possible inexplicable opposition to placing a hog operation in the comminuty, Bob must scout surreptitiously. Wind-blasted, lightening-stricken Woolybucket, Texas, would seem to be the perfect find, but one where Bob's cover story of scouting property for a development of luxury homes has the locals scratching their heads.

But while they're scratching, they're talking, spinning tales of generations of quirky Woolybucketites that have Bob enthralled. Abandoned by his parents at his Uncle Tam's thrift shop in Denver at the age of eight, Bob does not have many generations to look back on. For that reason he must make this job work. He must find the perfect spot for a Global Pork plant.

Reading Annie Proulx, you almost feel as if you're discovering the English language all over again. Uncle Tam's roommate Bromo Redpoll, has "glary eyes and a rubbery mug" and a strange chest. There are people named Rilla Nooncaster and Freda Beautyrooms. You have entered strange territory here, and it is worth while to take it slowly and enjoy the sights.

This is a comic novel and as such does not have the depth or emotional resonance of "The Shipping News." "Old Ace" is filled with great stories, but it will not grab you by the heartstrings and give your world a twirl.

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars 'Alle molens vangen wind', February 13, 2003

By 

Hans Bergmans (Bilthoven, The Netherlands) - See all my reviews

This review is from: That Old Ace in the Hole : A Novel (Hardcover)

'All mills catch the wind', is the translation of the Dutch motto of Annie Proulx latest novel, and as a Dutchman, and a devoted reader of her books, I couldn't resist buying it.
To my surprise, reviews of this book tend to be not so positive. To me, admittedly it's not as great as The Shipping News, but how could one improve on that novel? But it's a great book, vintage Annie Proulx.
I read it as a kaleidoscope of life and people and stories from the Texas panhandle, like Postcards was a kaleidoscope of large parts of the USA.
So, its scope may be smaller than Postcards, its characters are unforgettable, real, and very very funny. As a Dutchman I was struck by Habakuk van Melkebeek, the Dutchman in the book, who speaks nearly correct Dutch, with just a few spelling mistakes in the writing, a rare thing when Dutchmen are put on the stage in an American novel. He clearly is a Netherlands character, but also fully adapted to panhandle life.
Over the years I have traveled many parts of the US and I've grown to love it and the people that I've met. This book makes me look forward to visiting the panhandle, although ... I'll make sure to be low profile. Strangers are few and conspicuous over there, and appear not to be liked that much all of the time.