A threadbare tapestry of the Texas plains

Annie Proulx, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “The Shipping News” and the wonderful story collection “Close Range,” really should have known better than to settle on a title as awful as “That Old Ace in the Hole.” With the exception of “in” and “the,” there is not a word there that should be allowed into the title of any self-respecting novel, certainly not a novel of the scope and ambitiousness of this one. Then there are the names of the characters: LaVon Fronk and her son, Coolbroth, Ribeye Cluke, Ace Crouch and Tater Crouch, Tazzy Keister, Freda Beautyrooms, Sheriff Hugh Dough and his brother Doug, Jim Skin, Dick Head etc. One might expect Proulx, who used to be E. Annie Proulx, to know something of the inadvisability of peppering a text with such outlandish monikers, even one set in the territory of a Conway Twitty or a Breece D’J Pancake. She would have done well to heed her protagonist, Bob Dollar, in his observation of the Texas town of Woolybucket that “eccentricities were valued and cultivated, as long as they were not too peculiar.”

Young Bob, whose parents went off to Alaska when he was a boy, abandoning him to the care of his Uncle Tam, has been sent to Woolybucket, in the Texas Panhandle, on a clandestine mission to buy up farms so that they can be turned into intensive hog-raising factories by the multinational conglomerate Global Pork Rind. He is 25, something of a dropout, and in search of himself, or of any old self, so long as it is habitable. On the advice of his Global boss, who knows how much the Panhandlers deplore the spread of these giant noxious hog farms, he pretends that the interests he represents are seeking to build luxury homes in the area to be sold to rich clients hankering after a life on the prairie. The canny folk of Woolybucket do not really buy his story but welcome him anyway into their little community, for they are a tolerant bunch and do not mind much even when they discover his true intent.

He finds a place to stay, at $50 a month, in an old bunkhouse on LaVon Fronk’s farm, the Busted Star. LaVon, “who resembled one of the minor Roman emperors,” is a salty widow with a limitless trove of stories of the Panhandle and its colorful inhabitants. She is compiling a county history to be called “The Woolybucket Rural Compendium,” the material for which already fills two of the ranch house’s downstairs rooms. She is therefore, of course, a rich source of information, for the reader no less than for Bob, on all those Crouches and Doughs and Keisters. Indeed the novel, as one rapidly comes to realize, is not so much a narrative as itself a compendium of tales, tall and rarely short, which Proulx seeks to weave into a rich tapestry of rural American life.

Proulx, a New Englander who now lives in Wyoming and Newfoundland, is a curious hybrid among contemporary American writers. In her western fictions she is a beamingly benign version of Cormac McCarthy, yet her work also has affinities with that of Steinbeck and even Thomas Pynchon. However, the books which “That Old Ace in the Hole” is most reminiscent of are “Candide” and -- wait for it -- Evelyn Waugh’s “Decline and Fall.” Like Voltaire’s and Waugh’s hapless heroes, Bob Dollar wanders through a wicked world, an inviolable innocent, wistfully convinced that there is a better life awaiting him if only he can figure out what it is. He knows that the hog factories are poisoning the environment of the Panhandle, yet he has been given a job to do and is stubbornly determined to do it, even though it goes against the grain of his character to lie about his role as a spy for his egregious masters back at Global Pork Rind. Somehow we know from the start that he will come through with his decency intact and a brighter future in prospect, and we are not proved wrong. Like most fictional innocents abroad, however, Bob as a character is lacking in something essential, a vividness, a thereness, which in turn is a lack at the heart of the book itself.

Proulx is a natural storyteller, which is not the same as being a natural novelist. She displays a jaunty disregard for the rules of fiction and of the novel form but does not replace them with rules of her own. “That Old Ace in the Hole” is a big rattlebag of a book, filled with yarns, jokes, nuggets of faux wisdom of the cracker-barrel variety and a teeming cast of determinedly lovable eccentrics. It is not so much a narrative as a vast web of digressions. Failures of tone abound; here are two examples, the first a real clunker. After a wonderful set-piece cockfight, “Bob drove back to the Busted Star feeling he had been present at some dark blood sacrifice older than civilization, a combat with sexual overtones rooted in the deepest trench of the panhandle psyche.”

This is the kind of blush-making sentence a weary writer might write at the end of a long day and hurriedly strike out first thing next morning. There are other, less obvious but no less lamentable instances of stylistic laxity. Here is Bob Dollar at one of his shrewder moments:

“He had seen for himself that right-thinking ways were supported by billows of gossip and a constant and surveillant picking at those who showed the slightest tendency to slip off the trodden path unless they fell into the category of Colorful Panhandle characters. And work was the great leveler, work and the land, the twin assets of all rural people.” [italics added]

The italicized phrases here are no more than word clusters, not so much written as computer-generated. None of this would be worth commenting on if Proulx had not in the past shown herself, especially in the short stories, to be as sharp a stylist as anyone writing today. In the superb long story, “Brokeback Mountain,” for instance, there is hardly a surplus phrase or a word out of place. By contrast, “That Old Ace in the Hole” is what Henry James would have called a loose, baggy monster.

There is a plot, though it is rather a feeble one -- Global Pork Rind gets its comeuppance -- interrupted at every turn as yet another new character launches into yet another outlandish tale. But perhaps it is churlish to ask for narrative drive when there are such riches on offer. Proulx, for all that may be said of her failings in this book, has a vivid and capacious imagination and a fine ear for the rhythms of vernacular speech; one can hear these Panhandlers as they spin their web of stories. The prose too, when it is not slipshod, produces moments of peculiar, syncopated poetry: “Jim Skin came in, plastered with grease.” And amid all the skewed rural comedy there are, as always in this humane writer’s work, moments of tenderness to shake the heart. At the center of the book comes an almost perfect, four- or five-page vignette, recounting how Ace Crouch’s wife, Vollie, once fell secretly, hopelessly in love with a cowboy going by the name -- nicely judged, for once -- of Ruby Loving. Proulx, in a couple of sentences sketching the end of this non-affair, expresses with consummate skill the sadness and sweetness of these inarticulate lives:

“It was years before she pulled out of the feeling, scared, maybe love, or whatever it was for him. If she took a plum from a tree after fog or rain, beaded with droplets [of] moisture, she thought of him, thought of that hot sweaty Texas time.”