ACCORDION CRIMES

Rating:
Summary: The lowly accordion comes to life
Review: "Accordion Crimes" is an imaginative and well written book. Readers who first encountered Proulx through "The Shipping News" will be pleased to discover that the author's knack for writing provocative and moving prose is alive and well in this 1996 novel. The central theme--the struggle of immigrants to assimilate themselves into American society while maintaining ties with their native culture--will strike a chord with many readers. The device used to explore this theme is a hand-made green accordion, brought to the US by an Italian immigrant in the 19th century. The accordion changes hands numerous times, with each new owner spotlighted in a separate chapter of the book.

Fans of good writing will surely enjoy "Accordion Crimes." Most of the stories are dark and troubling. And only a handful of the characters are meant to be likeable. But the vivid storytelling will keep you turning the pages, as will the suspense of discovering the ultimate fate of the little green accordion ... and the treasure hidden inside of it. Those who are squeamish may be put off by Proulx's gruesome means of killing off her characters: suicide by chainsaw, electrocution by worm probe, being crushed under a collapsing cinder-block wall. It's enough to make Stephen King blush. In addition, the book is labeled as "a novel," but it's perhaps more apt to consider it a collection of short stories. As a result, character development and story lines are not as deep as they are in other Proulx novels. Nonetheless, those who read this book will likely enjoy enough of the chapters to make the experience worthwhile.

Rating:
Summary: Too much back story
Review: Clearly the author put a lot of thought into the back stories of all the different families who come into possession of the Green Accordion. Her frequent asides hint at the fullness of the story but each scene is so quick, so flitting that I found it difficult to engage any of the characters, save for the builder of the accordion. Each of these 50 page chapters could easily have been expanded into a separate novel making for a series of novels about the Accordion but I'm sure that her publisher wouldn't have wanted to take that much of a risk on a series of books about a musical instrument.

Rating:
Summary: Serious students must read every word Proulx writes.
Review: I just finished Accordion Crimes and while I enjoyed it, I could not rank it with The Shipping News. In some ways TSN is an elongated short story rather than a novel but it is long enough to develop the characters, particularly the character of Quoyle, which is what makes the book so endearing. Accordion Crimes, on the other hand, is clearly a series of short stories bound together by the rather weak thread of a single accordion filled with thousand dollar bills traversing history. We see a progression of characters in possession of the accordion that are bound together by virtue of an interest in music, being in the USA as an immigrant and, inevitably for this book, tragedy. Because of the page constraints for each character, there is very little Proulx can do in the way of character development although I did laugh out loud during one of the late chapters at the character Fay McGettigan where he says "They didn't have no pissproof watches then." Proulx could have written a novel around any of several of the characters she does not develop in the book but, it wouldn't have been the book she envisioned. Perhaps her initial idea wasn't bad but, generally, I think Proulx got lost several times in what she apparently most likes to do, research arcane subjects. We are either treated or subjected, depending upon your point of view, to the results of many of these researches in Accordion Crimes. I generally like a good bit of description in a novel, but she got so carried away it detracted from the story, but then, unfortunately, she didn't have that much story to work with, which may be why she chose to fill the pages with her research.

Having said all of this, the book is worth reading to get the occasional sentence or paragraph nugget which may be the main reason for reading Proulx in the first place. The woman can string words together in ways where noone has gone before. Any serious student of contemporary literature must read every word Proulx writes.

Rating:
Summary: many characters, no variation
Review: Sadly, I have to agree with the naysayers on this one.

The stories of the accordion owners are all monotonously similar: they live hard lives and die horrible deaths, and they all seem perpetually conscious of the "issues" of ethnicity and assimilation (as we might term them today). This strikes me as overly simplistic to the point of being insulting, though I am sure Proulx did not intend this. As the daughter of an immigrant, I can tell you for certain that my mother did not spend all her days obsessing about whether her loyalties were to her country of birth or to America; nor did she hate every other race; nor was her life endlessly miserable and gruelingly arduous; nor could her story possibly be representative of her ethnic group as a whole.

Of course, it's very wrong to assume that a writer intends a portrait of a single character to represent ALL members of a particular "group." Obviously Proulx does not think that all immigrants are exactly like the ones in this book. But again, because all of the stories conform to the theme I've described, Proulx gives the impression that this is her book's "thesis." Whether she intended this or not, it's not a thesis with any depth or realism or empathy. It makes for a book that, as other reviewers have pointed out, appears to be full of stereotypes and flat, unbelievable characters.