What I like in serious fiction are the pleasures of good drama: richly interesting characters caught in a grievous crisis presented in a highly condensed form, and the thrilling sweep, the history and information of epic and encyclopedia. And I want the opposition between readable brevity and boundless scope resolved by an original, complexly economic structure and flawlessly energetic writing.
Two books gave me these pleasures this year: The Beautiful Mrs. Seidenman by Andreej Szczypiorski (Vintage International, $9.95, 200 pp.) and E. Annie Proulx’s Accordion Crimes (Scribner, $25, 381 pp.). Both engage a great sweep of national and cultural identity in crisis, Szczypiorski (pronounced sh-ch’-ep-yorski) in only 200 small pages and Proulx in nearly 400 pages of lightning prose, swift and deadly. Szczypiorski gives us Poland in Warsaw just before the Ghetto uprising in April, 1943, and Proulx goes through a hundred-year span in the United States beginning with the lynching of some Italians in New Orleans in 1891. Neither writes a linear story. They layer narratives, shift character focus in each section, and make the present back into the past and fast forward to the future.
The Beautiful Mrs. Seidenman is pointlessly named in this English translation. Its Polish title, Poczatek, means “Beginning.” The book has many centers, in seventeen fascinating characters, ranging from a judge, an old Polish nobleman; a peasant nun drilling rescued Jewish children in Catholic prayers and false identities (“What is your name?” asked Sr. Weronika. “Januszek,” answered a black-haired, curly-headed boy with the smile of an old dealer in cow hides); a young man who had “chosen the career of a professional bandit, which in the era of great totalitarianism… was to become a pitiful anachronism” because “totalitarianisms themselves practice banditry in the guise of law”; a Jewish betrayer of Jews and a German officer; an old Socialist railway worker who can turn a wringer into a printing press because he understands not just machinery but “lies, truncheons, arrests.”
Through these centers you come to sense Poland as a place where Europe and Asia have always met, and where now “2000 years of European civilization” meet the first crude and as yet un-perfected form of totalitarianism. Both heroes and villains appear very matter-of-factly. The betrayer is distressed because the world is full of lies. The little tailor dies silently, apparently by mistake and without witness, against a wall, but when the lorry bearing his body has been driven away, a woman dips her handkerchief in his congealing blood and bears it away “as a symbol of human martyrdom.” In this structure of many centers, each life expands, opens out so you can see its origin, and ramifies to its end, all the while touching, connecting, meshing with the other ramifying lives. You finally realize you are seeing a whole culture and society as a living tissue. And it will hold.
Accordion Crimes shows us the “ethnic” and its dark other side: prejudice, virulent and commonplace. The middle class, the stuff of novels, scarcely appears here. The eye has become the ear; no character has any formal education, so the culture of the eye, reading and the visual arts, is absent. The scores of characters are aliens, quite other than the sort of person who can read the book, but vivid and unforgettable. There is one center, a little green accordion, made in Sicily and brought to New Orleans, and it is fated for destruction in the natural course of a hundred years because it is only an instrument of popular culture. But the cultures through whose hands it passes-the Sicilian, German, Mexican, French-Canadian, Cajun, Polish, Irish, Basque, Norwegian, and black traditions-fade and are lost. The grandson of a great Cajun musician “imitated his grandfather’s singing style with eerie accuracy for a year, then slid over to swamp pop.” Finally, dried and soundless, the accordion is run over by a highway truck, scattering the fourteen $1000 bills an earlier owner had sequestered within it, in an image like the gold dust blowing away at the end of Treasure of the Sierra Madre.
The author’s voice is always detached, brisk, business-like as a well-written newspaper, no matter what bizarre tortures she bestows on her characters. The detachment, the fierce energy, the wild ordinariness of the grotesque—Proulx is very like Swift, who I always thought was incomparable. Through this voice goes the other voice, of the music: “vibrant and keening,” “wailing,” “a voice like a blooded dagger,” “breathy, sobbing roars,” “sonorous, plangeant, shouting for grief to the mountain slope.” The little accordion’s notes fall “biting and sharp.. .hollowed with pain,” like the effect of Proulx’s own prose. The most remarkable passages in the book are the vivid, precise evocations of music most of us would find unimaginable. The other astonishing fact of the book is the grasp of Proulx’s research, all with the intense feel of primary source materials. The range and clarity of absolutely right detail is staggering. Proulx has a formidable genius, and here is its creation, a hundred years of an America you’ll never meet so remorselessly anywhere else.
