Barkskins (Proulx)

Barkskins
Annie Proulx, 2016
Scribner
736 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780743288781


Summary
Annie Proulx's new masterwork: an epic, dazzling, violent, magnificently dramatic novel about the taking down of the world’s forests.

In the late seventeenth century two penniless young Frenchmen, Rene Sel and Charles Duquet, arrive in New France. Bound to a feudal lord, a "seigneur," for three years in exchange for land, they become wood-cutters—barkskins.

Rene suffers extraordinary hardship, oppressed by the forest he is charged with clearing. He is forced to marry a Mi’kmaw woman and their descendants live trapped between two inimical cultures.

But Duquet, crafty and ruthless, runs away from the seigneur, becomes a fur trader, then sets up a timber business.

Proulx tells the stories of the descendants of Sel and Duquet over three hundred years—their travels across North America, to Europe, China, and New Zealand, under stunningly brutal conditions—the revenge of rivals, accidents, pestilence, Indian attacks, and cultural annihilation. Over and over again, they seize what they can of a presumed infinite resource, leaving the modern-day characters face to face with possible ecological collapse.

Proulx’s inimitable genius is her creation of characters who are so vivid—in their greed, lust, vengefulness, or their simple compassion and hope—that we follow them with fierce attention.

Annie Proulx is one of the most formidable and compelling American writers, and Barkskins is her greatest novel, a magnificent marriage of history and imagination. (From the publisher.)

Keep your eye out for the National Geographic channel's adaptation of Barkskins, currently under development (as of mid-2016).

Author Bio
• Birth—August 22, 1935
• Where—Norwich, Connecticut, USA
• Education—B.A., University of Vermont; M.A., Sir George Williams University
• Awards—Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award, 1994; PEN/Faulkner, 1993
• Currently—lives in Seattle, Washington

 
Pulitzer Prize winner Annie Proulx did not set out to be a writer. She studied history in school, acquiring both her bachelor's and her master's degrees and abandoning her doctorate only in the face of a pessimistic job market. Something of a free spirit, she married and divorced three times and ended up raising three sons and a daughter single-handedly. She settled in rural Vermont, living in a succession of small towns where she worked as a freelance journalist and spent her free time in the great outdoors, hunting, fishing, and canoeing.

Although she wrote prolifically, most of Proulx's early work was nonfiction. She penned articles on weather, farming, and construction, and contracted for a series of rural "how tos" for magazines like Yankee and Organic Gardening. She also founded the Vershire Behind the Times, a monthly newspaper filled with colorful features and vignettes of small-town Vermont life. All this left little time for fiction, but she averaged a couple of stories a year, nearly all of which were accepted for publication.

Prominent credits in two editions of Best American Short Stories led to the publication in 1988 of Heart Songs and Other Stories, a first collection of Proulx's short fiction. Set in blue-collar New England, these "perfectly pitched stories of mysterious revenges and satisfactions" (the Guardian) received rapturous reviews.

With the encouragement of her publisher, Proulx released her first novel in 1992. The story of a fractured New England farm family, Postcards went on to win the PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction. She scored an even greater success the following year when her darkly comic Newfoundland set piece, The Shipping News, scooped both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. One year before her 60th birthday, Proulx had become an authentic literary celebrity.

Since then, the author has alternated between short and long fiction, garnering numerous accolades and honors along the way. Giving the lie to the literary adage "write what you know," her curiosity has led her into interesting, unfamiliar territory: Before writing The Shipping News, she made more than seven extended trips to Newfoundland, immersing herself in the culture and speech of its inhabitants; similarly, she weaved staggering amounts of musical arcana into her 1996 novel Accordion Crimes. She is known for her keen powers of observation—passed on, she says, from her mother, an artist and avid naturalist—and for her painstaking research, a holdover from her student days.

In 1994, Proulx left Vermont for the wide open spaces of Wyoming—a move that inspired several memorable short stories, including the O. Henry Award winner "Brokeback Mountain." First published in The New Yorker and included in the 1999 collection Close Range: Wyoming Stories, this tale of a doomed love affair between two Wyoming cowboys captured the public imagination when it was turned into an Oscar-winning 2005 film by director Ang Lee.

Lionized by most critics, Proulx is, nevertheless, not without her detractors. Indeed, her terse prose, eccentric characters, startling descriptions, and stylistic idiosyncrasies (run-on sentences followed by sentence fragments) are not the literary purist's cup of tea. But few writers can match her brilliance at manipulating language, evoking place and landscape, or weaving together an utterly mesmerizing story with style and grace.

Extras
• Proulx was the first woman to win the prestigious Pen/Faulkner Award. (From Barnes & Noble.)

Book Reviews
Annie Proulx is on the side of the angels. We need more writers like her to hammer home the message that we had better stop mistreating one another and our planet. Unfortunately, hammering is just what she does, as when she annotates a senator's remark that "the Constitution was made by whites for whites." ("After all," she inserts, "who else was there?" Ha, ha.) The whole novel suffers such two-dimensionality.... [Still,] Proulx is particularly effective in conveying the effect of one generation on the next.... The root cause of our self-impoverishment is thoughtfully teased out in Barkskins.
William T. Vollman - New York Times Book Review


Magnificent... Barkskins flies... One of the chief pleasures of Proulx’s prose is that it conveys you to so many vanished wildwoods, where you get to stand ‘tiny and amazed in the kingdom of pines.’ This is also the great sadness of Barkskins. The propulsive tension here is generated not by wondering what will happen to each character, but by knowing that the forests will be leveled one after another... If Barkskins doesn’t bear exquisite witness to our species’s insatiable appetite for consumption, nothing can.
Anthony Doerr - Outside Magazine


(Starred review.) Barkskins is remarkable...for its scope and ambition—it spans more than 300 years and includes a cast of dozens. It’s a monumental achievement, one that will perhaps be remembered as her finest work.... [T]he kind of immersive reading experience that only comes along every few years. —Gabe Habash
Publishers Weekly


Rene Sel and Charles Duquet arrive in New France in the 1600s, penniless woodcutters bound to a seigneur (feudal lord), longing for freedom.... Proulx's intricate, powerful meditation on colonialism is both enthralling and edifying, each chapter building to the moving finale. —Stephanie Sendaula
Library Journal


(Starred review.) [A] rigorously researched, intrepidly imagined, complexly plotted, and vigorously written multigenerational epic. [With an] extensive and compelling cast, Proulx’s commanding epic about the annihilation of our forests is nothing less than a sylvan Moby-Dick replete..
Booklist


(Starred review.) Proulx moves into Michener territory with a vast multigenerational story of the North Woods.... Proulx's story builds in depth and complication without becoming unduly tangled and is always told with the most beautiful language. Another tremendous book from Proulx.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
1. Why does Barkskins begin with Charles Duquet and Rene Sel? Discuss their similarities and differences. How do these two characters influence not only their descendants but also the three-hundred-year course of the narrative?

2. Monsieur Trepagny says, "Men must change this land in order to live in it," and "To be a man is to clear the forest" (p. 17). Why does he believe this? What does Rene seem to believe about the forest and about being a man?

3. Wuqua’s garden, the Garden of Delightful Confusion, "pulled something inside Duquet as a child pulls a toy with a string" (p. 91) and stirs him "with an indefinable sensation" (p. 92). Why is Duquet, typically jaded and unimpressed, so moved by his experiences in China?

4. After Duquet wounds one of the trespassers, a boy, on his pine property, why do the boy’s cries of "Help. Me." and the gaze of the owl in the trees (p. 137) drive Duquet into a murderous fury? Why do the attempted theft and the boy enrage him so?

5. As Rene’s children Zoë, Noe, Achille, Theotiste and Elphege make their way to Mi’kma’ki, the "journey was rough underfoot and circuitous in their minds" (p. 168). Each hopes for different things and changes in different ways. How is each child affected? Why is Mi’kmaw country so powerful for them?

6. When Achille encounters a whale while fishing with his friends, the whale says to him, in Sosep’s voice, "You are not" (p. 185). After losing his family to the English, Achille claims, "I hunt no more. My life here is finished. I am not" (p. 195). Why does this phrase stay with Achille? What does it mean?

7. When Kuntaw meets Beatrix and she says, "I need you, Indian man. Follow," he feels that he stumbles "out of the knotted forest and onto a shining path" (p. 203). Yet when Beatrix’s health fails, "when she most needed him . . . he veered away from her" (p. 287). Why do they pull away from each other in the end, Beatrix falling in love with the doctor and Kuntaw fixating on the "One Who Would Come"?

8. Beatrix explains to Dr. Mukhtar that she can express affection only by teaching and offering books (p. 294). Where else is this connection between education and affection present in Barkskins? What other characters show their love this way?

9. The day after their wedding, Posey and James Duke discover they may be ill-suited, and James insists, " ‘We must talk all of this out.’ He believed in reason, though it was unreasonable to do so" (p. 372). How does this counterbalance of reason and unreason characterize their relationship?

10. Why, after all the tragedies Jinot endures, is it the women’s rejection of him in the kumara field that makes "the old, smiling, merry Jinot" evaporate, replaced by an "aging man who had known sorrow and difficulty and now, painful rejection" (p. 428)? Why these women and in this place?

11. Posey tells Lavinia that "if you know from experience what others must do to earn a living you will be a better person with a deeper knowledge of others. I have no use for the weak and helpless woman. You may need independence in your life, for women are too often taken advantage of—no one knows this better than I" (p. 491). Later, Lavinia is inspired by Angelique and her hammer and the image of an "army of young women advancing into the forests" (p. 507). How do these influences shape Lavinia and her actions throughout the rest of her life?

12. When Aaron Sel learns of his father Junot’s death in New Zealand, where Aaron refused to go, he feels "an interior ripping as though something was pulling at his lungs" and says, "I was a bad and stupid person before, maybe I still am that person but I think I am different." Peter Sel replies that "A man can get better" (p. 599). How does Aaron make himself better? What does he mean when he says, "I drink the shadow now. I find it good" (p. 601).

13. Throughout Barkskins we see the healing powers of the trees and the forests, from the Mi’kmaq and their medicines to Conrad Duke finding peace in trees after World War II (p. 664) to Afghanistan vet Tom who sees his fallen brothers in larches (p. 710). In what other ways do the forests heal people?

14. How does "runaway Egga, the direct descendant of Charles Duquet and Rene Sel" (p. 622) reflect his forbears? How is he different from them?

15. "In every life there are events that reshape one’s sense of existence. Afterward, all is different and the past is dimmed." (p. 49) Discuss moments like this for characters throughout the novel. What are your favorite moments? Which made you laugh? Which were unexpected?

16. Is it fitting that the novel closes with Sapatisia Sel and her forest restoration group? Where is Onehube driving? Why does Sapatisia groan, "Oh God, oh God! Put out the moon!" (p. 713)?
(Questions issued by the publisher.)

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