Reading Order
Postcards Reading Order
Postcards (1992) by Annie Proulx is her debut novel — the first novel published by a woman to win the PEN/Faulkner Award — the story of Loyal Blood, a Vermont farmer who kills his girlfriend in a terrible accident and flees westward across America, never to return. The novel traces Loyal's movements across three decades through the postcards he sends home — images of the places he passes through — and alternates between Loyal's wandering and the story of the family he has left behind: his parents' farm's decline, his brother's choices, his sister's trajectory. Postcards is structured around the American road and the American landscape — Loyal moves through Montana, Wyoming, Nevada, California, and across the plains, working as a trapper, a ranch hand, a uranium prospector, a construction worker, following the economic geography of postwar America. The novel is Proulx's most American in scope — less rooted in one place than The Shipping News or the Wyoming stories — and it announces the themes she would develop throughout her career: the relationship between landscape and character, the economic pressures that shape working-class American lives, and the price of flight.
Where to start
Postcards — any Scribner paperback. Debut novel, first published 1992; the PEN/Faulkner Award winner; a good entry point for readers who want to understand how Proulx's major preoccupations developed. The Shipping News (1993) is the companion and the novel most new readers start with.
Complete Postcards Book List
- 1Buy
Postcards
Annie Proulx·1992·The novel — Loyal Blood's flight from Vermont across America after a killing; PEN/Faulkner Award winner; Proulx's most American-in-scope novel, tracing the economic geography of postwar America through one man's three-decade wandering. - 2Buy
The Shipping News
Annie Proulx·1993·Proulx's Pulitzer Prize-winning companion novel — Quoyle's move to Newfoundland; the companion in her place-rooted fiction; where Postcards is a road novel about flight, The Shipping News is about arrival and the possibility of staying. - 3Buy
Accordion Crimes
Annie Proulx·1996·Proulx's third novel — the companion in her American landscape fiction; where Postcards follows one man across America, Accordion Crimes follows an object (an accordion) through multiple immigrant communities, achieving a similar breadth through a different structure. - 4Buy
East of Eden
John Steinbeck·1952·Steinbeck's great American family novel — the companion in the tradition of American fiction about the landscape and the family it shapes; the Trask and Hamilton families' California is the earlier literary version of what Proulx is doing with the Blood family's Vermont and American West. - 5Buy
On the Road
Jack Kerouac·1957·Kerouac's defining road novel — the companion in the American road tradition; where Kerouac's road is about freedom and possibility, Proulx's is about flight and economic necessity; both are portraits of a specific American geography in motion. - 6Buy
Cold Mountain
Charles Frazier·1997·Frazier's National Book Award-winning novel — the companion in American fiction about a man moving across a specific American landscape; where Loyal Blood is moving west after a crime, Inman is moving home after a war; both novels are about the landscape as the medium of an American experience. - 7Buy
Winter's Bone
Daniel Woodrell·2006·Woodrell's Ozarks novel — the companion in American fiction about working-class lives shaped by specific, impoverished rural landscapes; Ree Dolly's Ozarks are the Missouri version of the Vermont and Western landscapes that Proulx's characters inhabit. - 8Buy
True Grit
Charles Portis·1968·Portis's great American novel — the companion in the tradition of American fiction about justice and flight; where Loyal Blood is fleeing the consequences of what he did, Mattie Ross is pursuing them; both novels are about what Americans do with violence and what it costs.
Postcards — Frequently Asked Questions
What is Postcards about?
Postcards follows Loyal Blood, a Vermont farmer in his late 20s who kills his girlfriend Jewell in an accident — or perhaps not an accident — and flees westward, never returning home. The novel covers three decades of Loyal's wandering across America (Montana, Wyoming, Nevada, California, the plains) and alternates between Loyal's movements and the story of the family he left behind: his parents' farm's slow decline, his brother Dub's choices and failures, his sister Mernelle's marriage and trajectory. The novel is structured around the postcards Loyal sends home — images of the places he passes through — which give the narrative its visual quality and its sense of American geography as a series of images of place that never quite add up to a home.
Why is Postcards significant in American literary history?
Postcards won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction in 1993, making Annie Proulx the first woman to win that award. It was also her debut novel, published when she was 57 — an unusually late start for a major literary career. The novel announced a distinctive voice and a set of preoccupations (American landscape, working-class life, the geography of economic necessity) that she would develop across her career. In the context of American fiction of the early 1990s, Postcards was unusual in its scope, its structural unconventionality (the postcard structure), and its willingness to follow a large cast of working-class characters across decades and a continent.
How does the postcard structure work?
Each section of the novel begins with an image of one of the postcards Loyal sends home from wherever he is — a photograph of a place, a tourist image, sometimes a specific American landmark. The postcard images set the geographical and atmospheric context for the section that follows, and they also represent Loyal's relationship with home: he cannot return, but he keeps sending images of where he is, as if the images could substitute for his presence. The structure is also a portrait of American visual culture — postcards are mass-produced images of places, and their banality is part of the point; Loyal's life is being documented in the cheapest, most generic form of American visual communication.
What is Proulx's relationship to Vermont and the American landscape?
Annie Proulx grew up in Vermont and New England, and Postcards draws on that background for the Blood family's farm and the Vermont landscape of the opening sections. She later moved to Wyoming, which became the setting for Brokeback Mountain and the Wyoming story collections. Her fiction is consistently place-rooted — she cannot write about a place she hasn't inhabited, and her research for each book involves extended time in the landscape she is writing about. In Postcards, the Vermont opening gives way to the western American landscape, and the novel's movement westward is partly autobiographical — it follows the American migration from the worked-out East to the apparently open West.
What should I read after Postcards?
After Postcards, The Shipping News (1993) is Proulx's Pulitzer-winning companion novel and the work most readers start with. Accordion Crimes (1996) and the Wyoming story collections (beginning with Close Range: Wyoming Stories, 1999) continue her major fiction. For American road fiction in the same tradition, Jack Kerouac's On the Road and John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath are the most important predecessors. For American fiction about working-class lives and specific rural landscapes, Daniel Woodrell's Winter's Bone is the most important contemporary companion.
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