I completed Accordian Crimes last evening.  It took me two weeks…but, I stuck with it.  I found Shipping News to be such a rewarding narrative, that I assumed that anything else by the same writer would be as good.  Wrong.  It had many powerful moments, but honestly, it felt consistently tragic and that was disappointing.

To begin with, I was somewhat suspect once I read that the thread throughout the various stories/chapters was going to be a green accordion.  Was this going to be a device, like The Red Violin?  Did the accordion come first or did the violin?  The accordion did!!  I think that the story of the red violin was exceptional because it built upon the extreme passion and joy of life, as well as the violence, disappointment and regret.  It was a more balanced tale.

It turns out that there were portions of this DENSE book that really DID pull at my heart strings.  There were characters that became really important to me, but very quickly, the format of the writing took me to a new setting, a new immigrant family and completely different narratives.  At times it was difficult to ‘get into’ the next set of circumstances…too much/too soon sort-of-thing.  I was grateful for the final resolution simply because I wondered throughout the novel about the money.

Grateful, too, for the way that music provided the joy in such dark lives…I enjoyed the many references to music, lyrics and style.  Those moments provided the emotional relief required to hang in with this one.

I could not have reviewed the novel better than Mark Harris who did an awesome analysis here and so I’ve included his remarks in this post directly.  The review was made in 1996, so clearly I’m behind the times when it comes to fiction.

Mark Harris Review for Entertainment Weekly, June 21, 1996

No stranger novel is likely to reach this summer’s best-seller lists than E. Annie Proulx’s Accordion Crimes, a biography of a green squeeze box that arrives in America in 1890 in the hands of the man who lovingly crafted it and, in its 100-year journey from owner to owner to thief to attic to car trunk to pawnshop to landfill, manages to encompass a full and tortured century of the American immigrant experience. Each of the book’s eight chapters finds the itinerant instrument between the hands of a different ethnic standard-bearer — an Italian laborer in New Orleans, a German farm family in Iowa, a Pole on Chicago’s South Side — in a different era. The unrelated sagas add up to eight different family trees, each gnarled by fate, tragedy, chance, and cruelty.

Two years ago, Proulx’s The Shipping News became that rarity in the publishing world, a  “literary” novel-turned-word-of-mouth smash. As its numerous readers discovered, her descriptive voice can be astonishingly original. In Accordion Crimes, the language is both ebullient and asthmatically congested with detail. A house cat is “immense, squarish and orange, resembling a suitcase, his tail a broken strap.” An obese elderly woman has “skin like a slipcover over a rump-sprung sofa.” Proulx can blast light into every corner of a scene; she seems to see with extra pairs of eyes. String together 381 pages of these visions; throw in a little magic realism, some melodrama, and a stylistic trick or two — Proulx is exceptionally fond of suddenly leaping forward several decades to reveal, in parentheses, the grisly details of someone’s death — and you have a virtuoso performance.

What you don’t have is a novel. The difference between The Shipping News and Accordion Crimesis the difference between a fine book and one that’s so bent on being a masterpiece that it fails to tell a story. Forget about the accordion, a literal groaner of a linking device that wears out its welcome around the time a Mexican musician leaves it in the back of a Minneapolis taxicab. Proulx’s goal is to find something emblematic in the travails of first- and second-generation Americans, and she brings extraordinary clarity of insight into their particular woes. The best of these stories (say, three out of eight) create an enthralling hybrid of family history and imaginative fiction, in images no other writer has discovered. (And language no other writer has discovered; keep your dictionary handy unless words like mephitic, flerried, and lunty are in your vocabulary.)

For all its technical mastery, though, Accordion Crimes is destined to take up permanent residence at the swampy bottom of many a beach bag this summer. The America that greets its new arrivals is a relentlessly racist and embittering land, and Proulx’s vision isn’t particularly generous to the huddled masses she’s writing about. Among the ill fates suffered by Accordion Crimes’ characters are death by trichinosis, self-decapitation, drowning, plutonium poisoning, choking, stabbing, and electrocution by worm probe.

There’s something sour and dogmatic about a novel that allows so few of its humans to act humanly, then takes pleasure in dispatching them in the most arcane, “can you top this?” ways. Joy, kindness, and generosity aren’t part of Proulx’s landscape here, and their exclusion comes to seem strident. None of Proulx’s characters are allowed to take up too much space or emotion, lest their tiny places on her vast canvas of misery become too important. Accordion Crimes offers plenty of brushwork to admire — but the big picture turns out to be surprisingly small-spirited. B-