Book Review : Remarkable Tales of Rough Lives in a Bleak Climate

Heart Songs by E. Annie Proulx (Scribner’s: $16.95, 151 pages)

Gender research notwithstanding, women writers who live in unfinished hilltop houses in Vermont and list their greatest pleasures as fishing, canoeing and partridge hunting are not exactly thick on the ground, especially if they add that their significant interests are gardening, campfire coffee and good cider. Were it not for the Annie between E. and Proulx, you’d have every right to expect that a Hemingway disciple wrote these remarkable tales about life in the Northeastern granite country.

The stories are so thoroughly masculine in theme, point of view and empathy that you check the jacket copy to make sure that Proulx really is the mother of three grown sons. It isn’t so much the choice of subject matter as it is the expressed joy and fulfillment in blood sports, the complete understanding of how an elderly widower can impulsively marry the village slut, the precise nature of the bond between an old Yankee hunter and the young city slicker who pays him $300 a week for grouse-shooting lessons.

Until now, these particular concerns seemed to be exclusively male literary preserves, clearly posted against trespassers. In claiming a section of this hitherto private domain, Proulx doesn’t merely tell her stories or participate in them, but convinces you with every word that she has loaded and aimed the guns, gutted the birds, sat on a chrome chair with a torn plastic seat playing country guitar in a farmhouse kitchen, fantasizing about running away with the singer and recording a hit album.

Hostile to Strangers

These are hard stories set in a bleak climate; a closed, narrow world hostile to strangers and rough on its own. Even the names are harsh--the men are called Banger, Bobhot, Snipe, Sauvage, Stong ; Stong has a laugh “like a broken cream separator,” a “big, pebbled face,” and a general store full of rusty junk he sells to summer people eager to doll up their farmhouses with rusty hardware. Still, he’s one of the more endearing characters in this rogues’ gallery.

The women are called Verna, Reba, Urna ; names that sound like a cold wind off the Atlantic and suit them just fine. The people in these tales can wait a lifetime to get even, like Hawkheel in “On the Antler,” who so savors revenge that he rations it to himself, a little bit at a time. One way and another, “He’s got it coming” runs through the entire book like a spring torrent, sweeping everything in its path to an inevitable denouement.

As one of the characters in “A Run of Bad Luck” observes, “Everything that happens, happens in trucks.” In Proulx’s country, you’re either in the kitchen, off hunting or out in the pickup. There aren’t a lot of options, but those three places offer the maximum potential for drama. Though the author’s affections seem reserved for the beauties of nature, there is a terse quirky humor in the stories dealing with encounters between locals and the flatlanders who come to Vermont believing that “a house, a Jeep and an L. L. Bean vest will confer citizenship.”

“The Unclouded Day” is Proulx at her most droll, recounting the adventures of an investment broker who finally bags his first three partridges during an electric storm. Delivered by force majeure from giving his hopeless pupil any more shooting lessons, the local guide curls up in his warm bed, “wondering what Earl had said when he plucked three partridges that were already cooked.”

In an altogether different genre, there’s a mystical tenderness in “The Wer-Trout,” the story of a widower who consoled himself with whiskey until he learned that tying perfect trout flies and studying Chinese poetry were more effective therapies for grief. Assured as she is in this gentler mode, the author excels when she’s describing the hunters and fishermen she knows best, and the flintier and more adamant they are, the better she understands them.

Her people are like the retaining wall in “Bedrock,” “the rough granite stones locked into one another, their strength in their passive weight.”