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Postcards

3.69 of 5 stars 3.69 · rating details · 2,505 ratings · 179 reviews

Reproduced as graphics that preface narrative sections, the postcards in this novel -- communications between the Blood family and their son Loyal, as well as other personal mail and advertising material -- progressively reveal the insecurity of the rural Bloods in the changing post-war world. Loyal has fled into exile after an accidental killing, but cannot find a haven o...more

352 pages

Published (first published 1991)

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Best Books of 1992

127th out of 163 books — 64 voters

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Dec 21, 2007 Judy Vasseur rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: favorites

"Don't come out my farm no more with your damn insemnation racket. We got rid the Holstins. Guess we stick with god local Jersey stock. Do it the old fashion way with a BULL.
—Minkton M. Blood"
It’s a rich, dark, often humorous, in ways painful, epic escapade.

Annie Proulx has her characters experience all kinds of biblical catastrophes. Stuck in a mine explosion with cold water up to the knees so that the feet swell up and eventually the soles of the feet come off when the boots are removed follo...more

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Sep 12, 2007 Margo Solod rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

if anyone had told me that i could open a book that began with a rape and murder and by the end of the book actually empathise with the male character, i'd have called them nuts. but i did.

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Mar 24, 2011 Elizabeth (Alaska) rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 5-star-reads

On the front of my copy is a quote from a review by Frederick Busch of the Chicago Tribune: "A rich, dark and brilliant feast of a book." Perfect description. In the first few pages I felt this would go on my fictitious top ten list. Annie Proulx is an extraordinarily gifted author. Postcards was her debut.

The postcards at the beginning of each chapter give us information from outside the story we might not get anywhere else. They give us a timeframe for the setting of each chapter, or perhaps s...more On the front of my copy is a quote from a review by Frederick Busch of the Chicago Tribune: "A rich, dark and brilliant feast of a book." Perfect description. In the first few pages I felt this would go on my fictitious top ten list. Annie Proulx is an extraordinarily gifted author. Postcards was her debut.

The postcards at the beginning of each chapter give us information from outside the story we might not get anywhere else. They give us a timeframe for the setting of each chapter, or perhaps something in the character's own words, or perhaps a letter from something outside the story, such as a doctor or the IRS. The book lacks the continuity that a plot-driven novel would provide, but that is not to say nothing happens. Neither is it a collection of short stories. Readers of my reviews know I prefer characterization and I feel this is as much the characterization of a family as that of a person.

The ridge of muscle that supported her lower lip was as stiff as wood.

Loyal he sees his mother with dinner already on the table he comes into the house in the evening. The main character of Postcards is Loyal Blood, a man who wants nothing but to be a farmer, to live close to the land, to nurture and care for it. It is not to be. Yet it is this innate understanding of the way the natural world works that sustains him throughout his wandering life.

Yes, Loyal is the central character, but it was his mother's voice that I heard.

You couldn't get away from troubles. They came dragging into the mirror with you, fanning over the snow, filled the dirty sink. Men couldn't imagine women's lives, they seemed to believe, as in a religion, that women were numbed by an instinctive craving to fill the wet mouths of babies, predestined to choose always the petty points of life on which to hang their attention until at last all ended and began with the orifices of the body. She had believed this herself. And wondered in the blue nights if what she truly felt now was not the pleasure of driving but being cast free of Mink's furious anger. He had crushed her into a corner of life.

Time to go add her Wyoming Stories to my Wish List.

(less)

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Jan 04, 2008 Sheba rated it 5 of 5 stars

Proulx is fucking brilliant. The first book I read by her was Shipping News and I was blown away at how she, like ee cummings used punctuation or the lack thereof to make words hang like actual things.

I think Postcards was her first book but that she couldn't get it published until Shipping News was out and did so well. I think she wrote it in college. This makes it even more startling to me.

Postcards is raw and rough and very male. But this woman can write men, particularly men from the heartl...more

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Aug 19, 2009 Chana rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: american, literature-fiction, fiction-family-drama, pen-faulkner-award

Annie Proulx can write, she is a genius with description. The problem lies in the depressive nature of the story and in the assumption that we will understand her obfuscation about Billy's death and the nature of what is wrong with Loyal. She describes but doesn't explain. I realized that I would never see resolution nor gain understanding. I think that the incident with Billy was rape and murder, I think it may not have been the only time. But these are not laid out as clear truths, we don't kn...more

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Sep 06, 2011 Brucus Scriptus rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Annie Proulx. 2009. Postcards. London: Fourth Estate-HarperCollins. £7.99/$12: 340 pages.

Finished 6 September 2011. In a recent email to my brother John, I wrote, ‘Am reading Annie Proulx' book Postcards. Just when ya think things can't get worse, they do. Strangely reassuring, that woman's writing is.’

At least one knows what to expect. Postcards is every bit as awful, full of violence and regret as Proulx’ lovely The Shipping News. So why does her writing inspire us? Why does it so faithfully...more Annie Proulx. 2009. Postcards. London: Fourth Estate-HarperCollins. £7.99/$12: 340 pages.

Finished 6 September 2011. In a recent email to my brother John, I wrote, ‘Am reading Annie Proulx' book Postcards. Just when ya think things can't get worse, they do. Strangely reassuring, that woman's writing is.’

At least one knows what to expect. Postcards is every bit as awful, full of violence and regret as Proulx’ lovely The Shipping News. So why does her writing inspire us? Why does it so faithfully describe some aspects of dairy farming, even farmer suicide? Perhaps it’s the lack of bitterness. Anger and its consequent spiral of violence is acknowledged a terrible thing. But Jewell finally recognises that anger helped her testy husband Mink work the unforgiving hill farm that was always and forever off the map of New Deal rural electrification.

The book that most reminds me of Postcards is Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ One Hundred Years of Solitude. I’m the only reader I know who didn’t like 100 Years (because it took that long to read, making the characters hard to keep straight). The books are, however, similar, in that both Proulx and Marquez are capable of creating remarkable characters and life histories in a trice. The crime that truncates Loyal and Billy’s elopement is just the archetype for dozens of other troubles which, (if not rectified by a shotgun placebo) may be left dangling in the wind of the reader’s barb-wire imagination.

Cover blurbs extol the book as the best treatment of migrant workers since John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath. What could be more apt for the nastiest double-dip recession US workers have suffered since 1929-39?

The story has pockets of happiness. Most of the ‘winners’ are folks who refuse to accept their fate, or family’s past. Matriarch Jewell, after Mink is gone, learns to drive, gets a part-time job in a cannery, and experiences more comforts in a trailer park than she ever did as a farmwife – dreaming of pasting a ‘This Car Climbed Mt. Washington’ sticker on her VW. Another, an acned orphan of 19, advertises in a newspaper for a wife. A human interest writer matchmates Mirnelle and him, to their general happiness. Even Dub, Loyal’s younger brother – a dreamer and generally amiable idiot – finds years of success, and an interestingly piratical Cuban wife as his helpmate, in Miami real estate development. Like the millionaire instructor in his matchbook real estate school, he refuses to accept his poverty. Of course the IRS is attracted to him too, but compared to patriarch Mink, the husband and wife team are living the high life. Will it last?

Only a woman could have written this book. Any male writer attempting this plot - without main character Loyal enduring even more haunting guilt, and driven inexorably to some legal reckoning – would have been crucified by reviewers – even in a post-feminist era that gives writers more latitude. But Annie Proulx rises above political correctness to create an existential quilt – however reeking of dirty feet and dog fur – of real art. Many of the 'real Americas' inhabited by bartenders, farmers, miners, paleontologists, mail scammers and secretaries are known intimately by Ms. Proulx, who was born in 1935. Long may she continue.(less)

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Oct 27, 2008 Marieke rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: read-in-2008, oban-library

A hard book--not difficult to read, but the characters are hardened, their lives unforgiving, the land stark and mean. Bones jut up out of the soil and rock of this book, suddenly exposed and horrifying.

Proulx contrasts well against Kingsolver, who is all life, growth and healing, while in this book Proulx draws the living dead. Farmers who have lost everything, including limbs. A young man driven from home by guilt that wracks his entire life. Forty years of wandering the West without love or...more

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Mar 21, 2009 Tom rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

The story of a rural family and the struggles they go through: 1940s - 1980s.

There's a lot going on here.

The oldest son flees the family farm in an attempt to cover up a murder... or maybe an accidental death? It's never really made clear what exactly happened with his girlfriend. Most would probably conclude that he committed was rape/murder in a crime of passion, but there doesn't seem to be much motivation for that. My own conclusion was that it was accidental. But in the end, it doesn't ma...more

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Nov 22, 2012 Arthur Gershman rated it 4 of 5 stars

I highly recommend this novel as an engaging read. This ranks just below "Shipping News" among the E. Annie Proulx novels I have read. Loyal Blood is a young farmer in Vermont who accidently murders his lover Billy during an act of passion. He spends the rest of his life on a restless tour of the western United States engaged in a variety of occupations which Proulx makes interesting. All the while we wonder whether Billy's body will be uncovered and Blood will be brought to justice. In the mean...more

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Nov 16, 2010 Ashley Webb rated it 3 of 5 stars

I had a tough time deciding between three and four stars for this book. Proulx undoubtedly has the gift of amazing description, but there were times in the book when it just felt like too much. Similes are a great thing, but using two or three in a short paragraph can get repetitive.

Also, while I was well-aware that the novel is all about the American struggle, the negativity was almost overbearing. A good book will keep you going with all the ups and downs in the life of a character, but this n...more

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Apr 01, 2010 Linda rated it 4 of 5 stars

The more of Proulx I read, the more of Proulx I want to read. In this book she frames the passage of time and place through postcards sent to and from the characters in the novel. The protagonist, Loyal Blood, careens through life trying to flee from or reconcile a youthful evil deed. When we meet the man, he is a laconic youngster, wary and skeptical. We watch him evolve, into and out of relationships, into and out of professions, and finally from silent to loquacious as his sharp mind begins t...more

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Jun 19, 2011 Susan Emmet rated it 5 of 5 stars

Haven't read Postcards in years and decided to return to it. Glad I did. Using postcards as graphic chapter/section headers, Proulx weaves the story of the Bloods who live on a hardscrabble farm in Vermont. Father Minkton and mother Jewell raise two boys, Loyal and Dub, and a daughter, Mernelle. Loyal takes off after the accidental killing of his fiancee (he buries her body under a stone wall), Dub loses an arm and eventually takes off for FLA where he gets rich and loses all, while Mernelle eve...more

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Dec 16, 2008 Stephen Gallup rated it 4 of 5 stars

Viewed from the most obvious angle, this is bleakest novel I've read in years. At the outset, Loyal, an earnest do-it-by-the-book younger brother living on a hard-scrabble dairy farm, abruptly exiles himself to a life of wandering. Reacting in rage to this loss of much-needed help, the father shoots the cows his son has nurtured and then proceeds on a steep descent into failure and suicide. The older brother escapes to a new life as a real estate huckster in far-away climes. The daughter finds r...more Viewed from the most obvious angle, this is bleakest novel I've read in years. At the outset, Loyal, an earnest do-it-by-the-book younger brother living on a hard-scrabble dairy farm, abruptly exiles himself to a life of wandering. Reacting in rage to this loss of much-needed help, the father shoots the cows his son has nurtured and then proceeds on a steep descent into failure and suicide. The older brother escapes to a new life as a real estate huckster in far-away climes. The daughter finds romance via a newspaper's dating service. The mother moves to a mobile home from which she can watch their old farmhouse slowly collapse into ruin. Meanwhile, over a period of many decades, Loyal continues to send back postcards expressing hope that all is going well on the farm. Death threatens him in the form of a tornado and then a mining disaster. He tries buying his own farm only to see it destroyed by fire. Mostly, however, he sustains life by trapping fur-bearing animals and (his one true passion) digging fossils. At one point near the end I thought he was finally returning home. Maybe he thought so, too, or more likely the idea never once entered his head. At any rate, when the clock winds down for him he has nothing to show for the long years of striving other than memories, which apparently bore those who hear them.

This tale is redeemed, first of all, by its portrayal of life that I suspect is more accurate than we care to admit, and secondly by the exquisite dialog and scenes Proulx constructs with her prose. Here's one of the passagees I stopped to savor:

He didn't think there would be anything under the rabbitbrush. But as he came in to pull the trap and stake he saw her, a late-season coyote with a strong red color, stronger on her face, chest and haunches. The hot spring sun reflecting off the late snow had frizzled and burned her pelt like a cheap permanent. She pulled back from him with a gape that showed her teeth, she cringed and twisted in submissive posture, the yellow eyes fixed his. She looked at him. The crimped red hair, the extraordinary expression on the animal's face, in her body language, mingling appeasement, fear, anger, threat, resignation, pain, horror, and more, the terrible and thrilling sense of her life's imminent end. ... The fur was no good. Red, yes, but singed and rubbed. The foot didn't look too bad. She hadn't been chewing on it anyway. Quickly he threw the kneeling tarp over her head, twisted it tight so she couldn't lunge at him, and pried the trap open. The foot was swollen, but still warm, there was still circulation. He got up and pulled the tarp away in almost one motion. She was gone.(less)

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May 08, 2010 Joell rated it 4 of 5 stars

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Nov 24, 2008 Marielle rated it 5 of 5 stars

This was a great story of an entire family and their entire life. Annie Proulx doesn't care to linger on the horrible moment when Loyal Blood kills his wife, but rather continues on with his journey that spans up until the day he dies. There is no re-connection to the place he called home besides for the stack full of Bear Postcards he occasionally sends home that he grabbed while collapsing at a roadside diner. Instead, he wanders throughout the country taking odd jobs and living out of a trail...more

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Apr 19, 2012 Vivl rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

What can I say? I love (E.) Annie Proulx. I found this beautiful. It is similar to The Fishing News in that not a great deal really *happens* -- no big, story-telling plot-type things anyway -- but life goes on and is both intricate and day-to-day, beautiful and boring, significant on some scale and insignificant on the scale of all things. There are no come-uppances as such, there are no punishments meted out from on high upon those who "do wrong". It's just like life, basically, but beautifull...more

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May 31, 2011 Elsje rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: read-2011

Deze roman draait om de familie Blood, een boerenfamilie uit het Noord-Oosten van de VS (Vermont). Het boek start in 1944, wanneer de oudste zoon zich na een ongeluk (?) waarbij hij zijn vriendin Billie om het leven brengt, genoodzaakt ziet te vluchten. De overblijvende familieleden snappen er niks van en zijn vooral heel erg boos op Loyal: hoe moeten ze in godsnaam het toch al zo armlastige boerenbedrijf runnen met een man minder?
Loyal zwerft in de 45 jaar erna heel de States door en houdt cont...more

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Mar 12, 2008 Autumn added it

I'm not sure if I'm enjoying this book or not - it's so bleak and the characters all seem doomed to a horrible end - and are certainly experiencing pretty terrible middles. Nonetheless, it's really well written and my endless optimism leaves me hoping that something amazing will happen for the characters.

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Aug 16, 2009 Sara rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I have never been so thoroughly depressed in all my life as the day I read this book. I can't bring myself to read it again, though I know I will some day. It is a brilliantly written story, a life story worth reading, a heartbreak. Proulx always amazes me with her ability to imbibe the mundane details of a person's day, life, conversations, etc. with the true weight of a human life. As much as I wanted Loyal to succeed, to be happy, to love and be loved, Proulx does not give in to the temptatio...more

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Aug 09, 2012 Diane rated it 4 of 5 stars

This book is like watching the US grow and change with the characters it produced, messy and uncaring, yet human nonetheless. What a journey! I feel like I watched the simple hard life of the 20's and 30's morph into the confusing, complicated world of my parents age annd on into my own crazy, searching lifetime.
Leaves me a little melancholy. Even though the seemingly simpler times of the past had their share of heartache so eloquently rendered in this story, the future didn't offer up much to...more

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Nov 03, 2012 Judi rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: read-earlier-than-1998

In Postcards we watch the slow death of a Vermont family named Blood. Poorer than poor, things get even worse for them after World War II. Then Loyal Blood is forced to abandon the farm and head west after his girlfriend accidentally dies. Each chapter is preceded with a picture of a postcard and a message from Loyal and his escapades. Meanwhile, things get really bad at the farm and they wind up setting the barn on fire for insurance.

It's been awhile since I read this novel, but what impressed...more

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Apr 25, 2009 Claire S added it · review of another edition

Recommended to Claire by: Shipping News.

Shelves: fiction, historical, novel, on-writing, language, award_other, earthly, glimpses-considerable, pol-historical, pol-paradigm-shift-pssbl, politics-learning, psyche-of, u-s-hist, u-s-hist_corp-indstry, unplsnt-b-good, unplsnt-human-chaos-sbstnce, unplsnt, workplace

“His loneliness was not innocent.”

Proulx loads up meaning into her fewest possible words - like the chocolate chip cookies they load into a cup at the Sweet Martha’s booth in the Minnesota State Fair, so high you have to put your hand on top or you’ll lose some as you walk away - so once used to that, you get in the habit of quickly knowing all that is suggested.

But, in this book, some suggestions are left even more than that to the reader to fill in, like the one I started this review with. One...more

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Aug 29, 2009 Joy-Aisling rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: challenge-morality, goodbye-heteronormativity, madness-ahoy, practically-poetry, love-and-loathe, debut, c20th-american-lit

I have a passionate love-hate relationship with 'Postcards'. I adore Proulx's use of language and turn of phrase, but after a few pages her extremely poetic style pummells your brain into submission. Similarly, the disjointed quasi-vignettes of characters that the reader receives are in turns enjoyable and frustratingly dense. Her incisiveness and eloquence are beautiful; her subtle, shades-of-grey handling of morally-ambiguous sex and death are intelligent and intriguing (and pleasing in their...more

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Mar 14, 2008 Reba rated it 4 of 5 stars

Another great, tragic Proulx novel. She hits the nail on the head with human weaknesses and really tells it like it is. This is what I love about her writing--it's beautiful but very harsh at the same time.

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May 08, 2012 Deborah Ward rated it 3 of 5 stars

I am entirely not sure what to make of this book. First and foremost I admire and applaud the author for thinking so far outside the box. I despise novels that tie everything up into a tidy (but absolutely impossible) bow by the end of the book. This one leaves many loose threads, but a thoughtful reader will have enough to make the stories coherent. The characters in this novel grow, learn, and adapt but always stay on pitch. Perhaps the greatest joy in this read is the breadth of place, time...more

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Dec 10, 2008 Jonathan rated it 4 of 5 stars

Love how Proulx makes every sentence count.

"But Loyal knew it wasn't anything he'd swalloed. It was touching. Touching the woman. If it wasn't Billy it wouldn't be anyone else. The price for getting away. No wife, no family, no children, no human comfort in the quotidian unfolding of his life; for him, restless shifting from one town to another, the narrow fences of solitary thought, the pitiful easement of masturbation, lopsided ideas and solilouquies so easily transmuted to crazy mouthings. Up...more

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Mar 26, 2012 Maia rated it 4 of 5 stars

I am obsessed with Annie Proulx. I have been reading her short stories for awhile now, which are masterful, so I decided to try a full-length novel. I really enjoyed this book. The story follows the gradual dissolution of the Blood family, who are caught up in social processes outside of their control and poor choices of their own making. Every member of the Blood family is tragic in one way or another, some more likeable than others, yet each memorable nonetheless. Character development is one...more

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Jul 09, 2012 Hazel rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: adult, fiction, lit-nerd, make-me-want-to-write, read-in-2012, she-wrote-it, settlers-pioneers-cowboys, what-doesnt-kill-you, if-these-walls-could-talk

As if I need another reason to love Annie Proulx. Postcards is one of her earlier book-length works, and I find it fascinating to trace how her style progressed from this novel to The Shipping News to Close Range. I even found that her early style has some similarities to my own writing style. Thrilling!

In this novel, Proulx follows the lives of the Blood family over the decades. Loyal Blood wanders the country while his family falls into disrepair back home in Vermont. The way Loyal's story loo...more

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Nov 27, 2011 Veronica rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction

This is very like Accordion Crimes in concept, if less ambitious. Then again, it is still pretty stunning for a first novel. This time, Proulx follows the fortunes of the Blood family, notably Loyal Blood, who leaves home after an irreparable act and wanders alone for forty years. As in Accordion Crimes, Proulx uses his journey to tell the story of itinerant workers, living on the margins of society, and farming in the badlands.

How she gets into the heads of all these different people is still a...more

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Aug 01, 2008 Shea rated it 4 of 5 stars

I really enjoyed this book. Not everyone who has composed a review has liked it, and I wouldn't recommend it indiscriminatly to all of my friends. It's a rough book, set in mostly post-war 1940s and 50s in rural Vermont and based around a tough farming family. It's as much about America during that time as it is about the characters.

This makes you feel like you have dirt under your fingernails and cakey mud wiped across your face while you read. It forces you to understand a farmer's constant fa...more

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About E. Annie Proulx

Also published as E. Annie Proulx
Edna Annie Proulx is an American journalist and author. Her second novel, The Shipping News (1993), won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award for fiction in 1994. Her short story "Brokeback Mountain" was adapted as an Academy Award, BAFTA and Golden Globe Award-winning major motion picture released in 2005. Brokeback Mountain received massive c...more

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“The windows of his house shone in the darkness like squares of melting butter.” — 5 people liked it

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