Postcards
Annie Proulx’s first novel, which received huge acclaim and launched an outstanding literary career.‘Postcards’ is the story of Loyal Blood, a man who spends a lifetime on the run from a crime so terrible that it renders him forever incapable of touching a woman. The odyssey begins on a freezing Vermont hillside in 1944 and propels Blood across the American West for forty years. Denied love and unable to settle, he lives a hundred different lives: mining gold, growing beans, hunting fossils, trapping, prospecting for uranium and ranching. His only contact with his past is through a series of postcards he sends home – not realising that in his absence disaster has befallen his family, and their deep-rooted connection with the land has been severed with devastating consequences…
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ANNIE PROULX
Postcards
Fourth Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
First published in paperback in 1994 by Fourth Estate and by
Harper Perennial in 2006, reprinted 7 times.
First published in Great Britain in 1993 by Fourth Estate
Copyright © Dead Line, Ltd. 1992
Annie Proulx asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Source ISBN: 9781841155012
Ebook Edition © JUNE 2012 ISBN: 9780007385553 Version: 2018-05-23
‘Annie Proulx has come close to writing “The Great American Novel”’
New York Times
‘Postcards feels like a fifth or sixth novel, not a first. Language that sizzles like meat in a pan … A wonderful writer and an astonishingly accomplished novel’
Chicago Tribune
‘Her first novel fulfils the promise of her short stories … hugely ambitious … The natural description is superb. The dialogue has a raspy bony twang to it. She pushes language to breaking point … a gifted prose stylist who renders her characters on the page to mesmerizing effect’
San Francisco Chronicle
‘The author’s literary ancestors range from Edith Wharton to Nathaniel West. But Proulx sees the grand side too … She sees every part of the national configuration and wraps every character here in a crazy-quilt of literary affection’
Los Angeles Times
‘Postcards triumphantly delivers. You could use the word “great” about Postcards without embarassing yourself’
Boston Globe
‘Rich, boisterous, remarkable … Annie Proulx draws characters who matter’
Washington Times
For Roberta
Contents
6 The Violet Shoe in the Ditch
16 The Bigger They Are the Higher They Burn
17 The Weeping Water Farm Insurance Office
20 The Bottle-Shaped Tombstone
22 The Dermatologist in the Wild Wood
30 The Troubles of Celestial Bodies
40 The Gallbladders of Black Bears
43 The Skeleton with Its Dress Pulled Up
44 The Runty Rider Curses Judges
53 The Fulgurite Shaped Like a Bone
‘But that’s the part of it I always liked. He adjusted himself to beams falling, and then no more of them fell, and he adjusted himself to them not falling.’
DASHIELL HAMMETT, The Maltese Falcon
EVEN BEFORE HE GOT UP he knew he was on his way. Even in the midst of the involuntary orgasmic jerking he knew. Knew she was dead, knew he was on his way. Even standing there on shaking legs, trying to push the copper buttons through the stiff buttonholes he knew that everything he had done or thought in his life had to be started over again. Even if he got away.
He couldn’t get any air, but stood on his knocked-out legs gasping and wheezing. It was like he’d taken a bad fall. Dazed. He could feel the blood hammering in his throat. But there was nothing else, only the gasping for breath and an abnormal acuity of vision. Mats of juniper flowed across the field like spilled water; doghair maple crowded the stone wall wavering through the trees.
He’d thought of the wall walking up the slope behind Billy, thought of it in a common way, of working on it sometime, setting back in place the stones that frost and thrusting roots had thrown out. Now he saw it as a scene drawn in powerful ink lines, the rock fissured with crumpled strings of quartz, humps of moss like shoulders shrugging out of the mold, black lignum beneath rotten bark, the aluminum sheen of deadwood.
