That Old Ace in the Hole : A Novel
by Annie Proulx
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Book Summary Information
Author: Annie ProulxEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2003-09-16
ISBN: 0743242483
Number of pages: 361
Publisher: Scribner
Book Reviews of That Old Ace in the Hole : A Novel
Book Review: Slow and Muddy as the Platte in Summer
Summary: 2 Stars
Annie Proulx is best known for storming onto the literary scene in 1993 with her novel The Shipping News, which won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. The book became a wildly successful bestseller, and was made into a commendable movie staring Kevin Spacey and Julianne Moore.
So it couldn't have hurt Proulx too badly when The Atlantic Monthly published the article "A Readers' Manifesto: An Attack on the Growing Pretentiousness of American Literary Prose," in which B.R. Myers attacked a handful of well-respected authors, for their empty, affected literary styles. He singled out Proulx for purple prose and meager storytelling.
Proulx's new novel, That Old Ace in the Hole does not suffer from The Shipping News' fancy style for its own sake. For the most part, its language is straightforward and clear and only rarely resorts to such contrived writing as, "In the fallen windmills and collapsed outbuildings he saw the country's fractured past scattered about like the pencils on the desk of a draughtsman who has gone to lunch."
The novel's main character is Bob Dollar, a recent college graduate who is hired by Global Pork Rind to drive from Denver down to north Texas and spy on the locals, searching for an aging rancher who's willing to sell a big plot of land on which to locate a new hog farm. As the local north Texans know (but naïve, young Dollar does not) hog farms are some of the most noxiously polluting business ventures that exist. They pollute earth, air, and water with toxic hog waste and gas, and this seems to be the novel's chief message.
Proulx's callow main character has a personality that matches his profession; he's a watcher without much personality of his own. It brings to mind David Copperfield, serving Dickens' novel as a passive eye who wanders through episodes in the lives of a motley bunch of quirky English characters, but doesn't really have an effect on people himself. Like Dickens' passive main character, Bob Dollar just listens to the eccentric locals' constant, informative anecdotes and gradually amasses a good deal of knowledge about the land around fictional Woolybucket, Texas. From these locals, we learn a lot about ranching, about windmill maintenance, mule teams, cattle drives, historical cowboys, cockfights and the oil business. In fact, one has to admire Proulx's prodigious research.
Also admirable is Proulx's sense of local dialect. She has a good ear for the north Texan drawling, g-dropping accent which is not just southern and not just western, but a little of both, like Texas itself. And we do get a strong feel for the locale. We're given a high, flat prairie that was once a land of opportunity but is now past its prime, suffering a transition from local color to global homogenization.
We're given a picture of region where aging ranchers are ready to pass their land down to their children who don't want to continue ranching. So the elders sell the land to the highest bidders, whether they're oil and gas companies, real estate developers or, worst of all, corporate hog farms.
So That Old Ace in the Hole has a strong sense of place informed by dozens and dozens of fact-filled historical anecdotes. But unfortunately, the novel does not treat us to much of a main story. I'm probably old-fashioned and a philistine, but when I read a novel, I expect to be drawn into its story--its character dilemmas, its conflicts and crises. If I'm treated to lots of well-researched facts and extended digressions along the way, all the better, but there had better be some vivid, fully-drawn characters who have something to gain and something to lose. That Old Ace in the Hole, unfortunately, is filled with half-drawn characters with not too much at stake. Instead of a rich, delicious meal, we're given tray after tray of half-warmed appetizers.
Only after reading three-quarters of the longish book are we told that Bob Dollar hates his job working as spy for Global Pork Rind. Before then, this possibly ripe source of conflict is never even alluded to. It's hard to care for a character who keeps quiet and doesn't seem to care much about anything himself. Proulx tells Bob Dollar's story largely in retrospect, as if from far away. And because the bulk of the book consists of a series of short anecdotes told by peripheral characters, the reader isn't allowed to experience the stories directly, as they happen. Which makes for an often tedious read.
It's worth noting that the novel begins in Denver and, in a later chapter, returns to Denver. Proulx gets her landmarks right, mainly setting these scenes on West Colfax Avenue. But she doesn't capture Denver's feel. Denver and its inhabitants come across as quirky, dusty curios, like objects sold in a thrift store. There's a tinge of black humor in the futility of the people who live on or around West Colfax (reminiscent of Samuel Beckett) and some funny moments, but a traveler relying on this novel to get an accurate feeling for Denver would see it as a dismally boring, dusty place populated with uneducated misfits, conspiracy theorists and angry youth addicted to slasher movies. And none of them can spell good. For more writings visit www.maninquotes@blogspot.com
Summary of That Old Ace in the Hole : A Novel
From Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner Annie Proulx comes That Old Ace in the Hole, an exhilarating story brimming with language, history, landscape, music, and love.Bob Dollar is a young man from Denver trying to make good in a bad world. Out of college and aimless, Dollar takes a job with Global Pork Rind, scouting out big spreads of land that can be converted to hog farms. Soon he's holed up in a two-bit Texas town called Woolybucket, where he settles into LaVon Fronk's old bunkhouse for fifty dollars a month, helps out at Cy Frease's Old Dog Café, and learns the hard way how vigorously the old Texas ranch owners will hold on to their land, even when their children want no part of it.
Robust, often bawdy, strikingly original, That Old Ace in the Hole traces the waves of change that have shaped the American West over the past century -- and in Bob Dollar, Proulx has created one of the most irrepressible characters in contemporary fiction.
Bob Dollar is a reluctant land swindler. When the 25-year-old protagonist in Annie Proulx's That Old Ace in the Hole signs on as a location scout for Global Pork Rind, an industrial hog farming corporation, he has no idea what kind of moral quandaries he's in for. Well, maybe he does. His assignment, after all, is to infiltrate a tiny town in the Texas Panhandle and find a tract of land his employer can turn into an industrial hog farm. Bob tells the locals he's scouting for luxury home developers ("They feel there is potential here"), but as a cover story it's less than clever. Only a fool would build mansions in the godforsaken Panhandle country, a place of light soil, bad wind, killing drought, and end-of-world thunder. "To live here," one Panhandler tells Bob, "it sure helps if you are half cow and half mesquite and all crazy." The narrative follows Bob's hapless quest to ink a deal, but Proulx's mission is bigger than that. She's out to tell the story of the Panhandle itself, to write an entirely new literary territory into existence. With the help of a menagerie of eccentric characters set down in "the most complicated part of North America," Proulx succeeds admirably. --Claire Dederer
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