Pulitzer-winning novelist takes Texas Panhandle romp

By Samantha Gross
Associated Press

•	"THAT OLD ACE IN THE HOLE" by Annie Proulx; Scribner, hardback, $26

In "That Old Ace in the Hole," the Pulitzer-Prize-winning author of "The Shipping News" (1994) trails the inscrutable Bob Dollar as he infiltrates Woolybucket, a small town on the Texas Panhandle.

Or at least she tries to.

But Proulx's tale keeps veering off course and into the lives and secrets of several generations of Woolybucket residents. A stubborn lot they are, too.

They include hapless pioneers and heartbroken cowboys, a reserved bride with a lusty, wandering eye, a compulsive Dutchman who strikes it rich, a conniving saleswoman, an incestuous sheriff, a gregarious genealogist who loves deadly spiders, and a bison-herding monk with a masterful command of the lasso.

In Proulx's novel, they run wild across the history of the panhandle, and amid all the confusion, it seems unlikely that she'll be able to rein them into one tidy package.

Her main plot follows Dollar, a young man sent to Woolybucket as an undercover land scout for industrial hog farms.

The noisome farms, where employees are allowed to refer to the livestock only as "pork units," are universally hated in Proulx's panhandle, where they are seen as an environmental menace and a perversion.

Such terms are not too severe for Woolybucket, where a cloud can become a deadly storm in minutes and disgruntled wives carry shotguns.

Woolybucket is steeped in history. LaVon, Bob's gritty landlady, has assigned herself the unwieldy task of gathering all the region's yarns, which has left her house overflowing with "boxes of photographs and diaries, faded envelopes" and other "genealogical reminiscence."

Hers are winsome tales, filled with enterprising cowhands and robust farm girls who, by the time of the telling, have mostly grown old.

The novel is overrun with these accounts, all of them weighted by a slight nostalgia for lives gone by and a time before barbed wire, when herds of cattle ran free.

Nostalgia afflicts many Woolybucket residents, who seem driven to keep things as they were, and Bob comes up against harsh resistance in his quest to acquire land for his employer, Global Pork Rind.

At times it seems Proulx is overreaching. The quick switches between time periods and the extensive cast of characters can be confusing without offering a eureka payoff like those in similar stories.

Proulx never does draw her many tales into a cohesive and streamlined ending. The novel has the flavor of LaVon's files: family histories, legends and love letters mixed together and spilling out of their boxes.

But the mess Proulx has created is a charming one, and ultimately, the chaotic structure of the novel proves to be the one that best fits its story.

Old Ace Crouch, the wizened windmill man who fights Bob's efforts to buy his land, tells Bob: "You think ... (the panhandle is) just a place. It's more than that. It's people's lives, it's the history of the country."

Although Dollar gets the most attention, the real protagonists of the novel are the panhandle's untamed landscape and people.

Both have withstood industry and age, and they are not yet ready to give in to change.