Question 1

What is Accordion Crimes about?

Accepted Answer

Accordion Crimes is structured around a small green diatonic accordion, made by an Italian craftsman in Sicily in the 1890s and brought to New Orleans. The accordion's first owner is killed almost immediately after arriving in America. The accordion then passes through a series of owners across the 20th century, each section being essentially a separate novella set in a different American community: German immigrants in the Midwest, Cajuns in Louisiana, Mexicans in the Southwest, African Americans in the Mississippi Delta, French Canadian lumberjacks in the Northwest, Norwegian immigrants in the Dakotas. Each community is depicted through the lens of its folk music — the accordion is the carrier of cultural memory — and each section ends with violence or loss.

Question 2

What is the theme of Accordion Crimes?

Accepted Answer

Accordion Crimes is fundamentally about the cost of the American immigrant experience — not the triumphant narrative of assimilation and success but the elegiac story of what was lost. Each immigrant community in the novel loses something in the process of becoming American: language, tradition, the specific culture they brought from the old country, the music that expressed it. The accordion is the symbol of this loss — it is folk music, the music of the community before assimilation, and its passage through American hands is a story of cultural dispossession. Proulx has said the novel is about the loss of ethnic identity in the great American assimilation machine.

Question 3

Is Accordion Crimes difficult to read?

Accepted Answer

Accordion Crimes is Proulx's most demanding novel because each section introduces an entirely new cast of characters in a different setting — readers who want to follow specific people across the whole novel will be frustrated. The novel rewards a different reading posture: accepting that the accordion is the protagonist and that the human characters are secondary, and reading each section as a self-contained portrait of an American community. The prose is Proulx at her most compressed and specific, which is rewarding but requires attention. New readers to Proulx should start with The Shipping News, which is more conventionally structured; readers who have already engaged with her voice will find Accordion Crimes her most ambitious work.

Question 4

How does the accordion function as a symbol?

Accepted Answer

The accordion functions as both a literal object (it travels through America in the hands of different owners) and a symbol of folk culture and its fate in America. The diatonic accordion is the instrument of folk music across multiple European traditions — it is played at community dances, at weddings, at the gatherings that preserve cultural memory. Its passage through American hands is a story of how folk culture gets absorbed, devalued, and lost in the process of assimilation; the communities in the novel increasingly play American music on the accordion rather than the music of their origin cultures. By the novel's end, the accordion itself is destroyed, which is the novel's summary statement about what happens to the culture it represents.

Question 5

What should I read after Accordion Crimes?

Accepted Answer

After Accordion Crimes, The Shipping News (1993) is Proulx's more accessible Pulitzer-winning novel. Postcards (1992) is her debut and companion in American landscape fiction. The Wyoming story collections (Close Range, 1999; Bad Dirt, 2004) are her most concentrated short fiction. For American novels with similar formal ambition and scope, John Dos Passos's USA Trilogy is the most important predecessor. For the American immigrant experience in fiction, Howard Fast's The Immigrants and Willa Cather's My Antonia are important companions.

Accordion Crimes Reading Order

Complete Accordion Crimes Book List