Postcards

Postcards begins during the Second World War on the Blood family's poor ancestral farm in Vermont. Loyal Blood, the eldest son and a young trapper, accidentally kills his girlfriend, Billy, while they are making love in a field. He hides her body in a fox den and leaves, telling his family that he and Billy are going west to start a new life. For the next four decades, from 1944 into the 1980s, he drifts from job to job across the American West, mining, hunting fossils, trapping, and carrying the crime with him; it leaves him unable to touch a woman, and his body pays for it in psychosomatic ailments. He sends postcards home, but they carry no return address, so nothing that happens to his family ever reaches him.

A great deal happens. His father, Mink, and his brother, Dub, burn the barn for the insurance money and are sent to prison, and his father takes his own life. His sister, Mernelle, marries a man she has met through the mail. His mother sells the farm to a developer who wants it for a trailer park. The book cuts between Loyal on the road and the family he left behind, and each chapter opens with a postcard, some his and some from other hands, so that postcards run through the book like a record of a country changing faster than the people in it.

This was Proulx's first novel, and it is dark. The killing comes early and nothing afterward lets Loyal off, and the family's losses come one after another. Kirkus found it "shrewdly, imagistically written" but "not exactly invigorating." Publishers Weekly praised its "rich, sensuous prose" and its ear for rural voices, while complaining of "the overabundance of minor characters randomly introduced into the narrative." The book runs to well over three hundred pages, and it rewards readers who like hard lives rendered exactly, with long attention to work, weather and land. Readers who came to Proulx through The Shipping News will find the same eye for weather, work and bad luck here, with less comfort.