STRIKING THE WRONG CHORD

By Paul Gray

Not many novels manage to combine high literary aspirations with wide popular appeal. E. Annie Proulx's The Shipping News (1993) did so triumphantly. Critics loved Proulx's intense, sensuous prose. Readers for pleasure eagerly riffled through the pages because the author made them wonder what would happen next to the central character, a grieving widower who takes his two daughters and tries to start a new life on his family property in Newfoundland. After this Pulitzer-prizewinning performance, Proulx could count on her next novel churning up much anticipation.

What hardly anyone expected was Accordion Crimes (Scribner; 381 pages; $25), a book that is, in at least one crucial respect, the antithesis of The Shipping News. Accordion Crimes has no central character, unless that term is stretched to include a 19-button green accordion that is brought by its Sicilian maker to New Orleans in the early 1890s. This instrument spends roughly the next 100 years--and the entire novel--drifting haphazardly into the possession of different people or, more precisely, members of different immigrant groups struggling to establish themselves in the U.S. After the accordion maker (who, somewhat portentously, is always called that, even though Proulx gives his son the name Silvano) is killed in a xenophobic riot, the instrument finds its way to a German immigrant farmer on the Great Plains. He and his fellow Germans suffer persecution from the locals during World War I, and when he dies, the accordion winds up in Texas in the hands of a Mexican American similarly persecuted by gringos. And so on.

As if this technique were not enough to squelch narrative interest in her people, Proulx often introduces parenthetical flash-forwards detailing the ways in which her characters will die: "(Some year or two later, Snakes, using a climbing rope with a single core in a color pattern of purple, neon pink, teal and fluorescent yellow, hung himself in the cab of his truck. A note on the seat read, 'I'm not going to wear glasses.')" The emphasis in this passage pervades the entire novel: things survive and are worth careful descriptions, while people are passing fancies. That could have been conveyed more economically than it is in this disappointing book.

--By Paul Gray