Abused Beyond Saving?

I’m Alex Hunt, Professor of English at West Texas A&M University in Canyon for the HPPR Radio Readers Book Club 2022 Fall Read.

It’s my pleasure to be discussing Annie Proulx’s That Old Ace in the Hole, published in 2002. Proulx is best known for her novel The Shipping News, which won both the Pulitzer and the National Book Award, and her short story “Brokeback Mountain,” which caused quite a stir when Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal starred in the film version.

But That Old Ace in the Hole is a different kettle of fish. Set in the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles, the novel follows a lackluster young man named Bob Dollar who comes into the region as a site scout for Global Pork Rind. According to Proulx, she started the novel with the intention of focusing on the life of a wind miller, spending time in the region around the year 2000, but got sidetracked by the controversy then brewing on massive corporate hog farming operations.

The structural messiness of the novel may reflect Proulx’s changing focus, but I have always found that this structural messiness also makes it a fascinating novel to read and teach, which I do with some regularity at my university. My students initially respond to the novel in a polarized manner—they love it or hate it, but it has proven to generate good discussion and leads students to value the experience and re-value the book.

Bob Dollar may be less a character than a vehicle for exploring the southern plains region. As readers, we travel along with Bob as he drives into the panhandle, the public radio station on the car stereo fading away into country music. With Bob, we learn about the region’s history, culture, and agriculture. We also learn about its challenges.

Throughout her body of work, Proulx writes of various regions and places that intrigue her. The perennial question that she explores is that of local culture versus global economics. To what degree are local places, rural and regional cultures, which so fascinate and charm us, able to hold on to what makes them unique and interesting in such a globalized era? What many of my students initially see as a sharp satire of regional culture (and the novel certainly has this aspect) becomes in a more complex way a hankering after the richness of regional difference, the celebration of sense of place.

Bob Dollar, Proulx writes, “knew he was on prairie, what had once been part of the enormous North American grassland extending from Canada to Mexico, showing its faces to successions of travelers who described it in contradictory ways. [He] had no idea he was driving into a region of immeasurable natural complexity that some believed abused beyond saving . . . it seemed he was not so much in a place as confronting the raw material of human use. . . .

In the fallen windmills and collapsed outbuildings he saw the country’s fractured past scattered about like the pencils on the desk of a draughtsman who has gone to lunch. The ancestors of the place hovered over the bits and pieces of their finished lives.”

As Bob learns to appreciate the place, so does the reader unfamiliar with the plains. For those of us who live here, we see our place through the eyes of a critical outsider, but an outsider who finds much to love.

I’m Alex Hunt, Professor of English at West Texas A&M University in Canyon for the HPPR Radio Readers Book Club 2022 Fall Read. Thanks for listening.