Barkskins

Starred review from February 29, 2016
Reviewed by Gabe Habash Very long novels have perennially commanded our attention—Donna Tartt, Marlon James, Hanya Yanagihara, and Garth Risk Hallberg have written four of the most discussed novels of the past three years; they are all more than 700 pages. But Annie Proulx’s Barkskins is remarkable not just for its length, but for its scope and ambition—it spans more than 300 years and includes a cast of dozens. It’s a monumental achievement, one that will perhaps be remembered as her finest work.
Structured in 10 novella-length sections, the book begins with two Frenchmen, René Sel and Charles Duquet, who arrive in New France (now Canada) in 1693 to work for a local seigneur in exchange for land. The first section is about Sel, a born woodsman who fathers three children with Mari, a Mi’kmaq woman. The second follows Duquet, the wilier of the two, who runs away and, snatching up tracts of woodlands in the northeast, founds a timber company in Boston called Duke & Sons. The subsequent sections alternate between each man’s bloodline, tracing displacement, resettlement, and death, finishing in 2013.
The descendants of Sel battle the erosion of Mi’kmaq culture (at the book’s end, their number dips below 1,500), often struggling to adapt as Europeans flood North America, while the Mi’kmaq drift and take labor jobs as they are uprooted. Among the Sels are Achille, René Sel’s son and a master hunter, who goes on a moose hunt but discovers English soldiers waiting when he returns home, and Jinot, a Sel descendant further down the line, who finds himself cutting huge kauri on an ill-fated journey to New Zealand. Meanwhile, Duquet’s descendants take up the family business. James Duke, Duquet’s great grandson whose “future flickered before him as a likely series of disappointments,” pushes west to find new sources of timber. And James’s daughter, the hungry and enterprising Lavinia, perhaps the book’s most memorable character, brings unprecedented growth during her time at the helm.
The middle of the book can become a bit overwhelming, as the reader attempts to juggle all the new characters and story lines Proulx introduces, but, as in the best epics, the later pages are weighted with all that’s come before. Decisions and incidences have ramifications that pop back up again, often hundreds of years later, in astonishing ways. In relating character to setting, repeatedly showing how one influences the other, there are shades of Steinbeck’s East of Eden. But the forests are decimated, and characters are summarily, violently dispatched, often offstage. And as years pass in the space of a few pages, it becomes clear that history and time are the main characters here, each moment incremental and nearly insignificant in and of itself, but essential in shaping the world that emerges at the story’s conclusion.
It’s exhilarating to read Proulx, a master storyteller; she is as adept at placing us in the dripping, cold Mi’kma’ki forests as in the stuffy Duke & Sons parlors. Despite the length, nothing seems extraneous, and not once does the reader sense the story slipping from Proulx’s grasp, resulting in the kind of immersive reading experience that only comes along every few years.
Gabe Habash is the deputy reviews editor of Publishers Weekly. His debut novel is forthcoming from Coffee House Press.

January 1, 2016

It's hardly surprising to see the author of the Pulitzer Prize- and National Book Award-winning The Shipping News turn out something so grand. Proulx starts off in the late 1600s with illiterate woodsmen Rene Sel and Charles Duquet, who abandon northern France for New France. Rene marries a Native healer, Duquet eventually travels worldwide as he launches a prosperous logging company, and the narrative weaves together the descendants of both men, plus those of their friends and enemies, as it shows how immeasurably hard life was at the time.

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

December 5, 2016
It’s a pleasure to listen to Petkoff’s low-key, straightforward reading of Proulx’s ambitious novel that spans 300 years and multiple locations. His reading is well paced and his diction clean and clear. But he faces the near-impossible task of rendering the foreign sentence structures and accented English dialogue of a huge variety of international characters in different periods of history. Proulx’s characters are French, English, Spanish, Irish, Scottish, Dutch, Chinese, American, Canadian, and Native American. The pidgin English of Native American men, women, and children is especially distracting for the listener when read aloud, for it turns the listener’s focus from the story to the accents. A Scribner hardcover.

May 1, 2016

Rene Sel and Charles Duquet arrive in New France in the 1600s, penniless woodcutters bound to a seigneur (feudal lord), longing for freedom. Duquet escapes to Boston then Amsterdam while Sel is forced to marry Mari, a Mi'kmaw servant. Pulitzer Prize-winning Proulx (The Shipping News; Brokeback Mountain) traces the interconnected Sel and Duquet families through the centuries. Charles changes his surname to Duke and adopts three orphans in addition to having a son, Outger, with his wife, Cornelia. The disappearance of Charles and news of Beatrix--a daughter of Outger living in the Duquet homestead on Penobscot Bay with Kuntaw Sel, grandson of Rene--galvanizes the adopted sons to subdue a metis claim to fortune. Jinot Sel, who suffers at logging camps in Maine and New Brunswick, finds an enigmatic benefactor. Headstrong Lavinia Duke relocates the business from Boston to Chicago in the 1880s and marries rival Dieter Breitsprecher. Then Dieter's children sell the company after World War II. The Sels dwindle on reservations, wistfully watching their disappearing culture, unaware of their kin. VERDICT Proulx's intricate, powerful meditation on colonialism is both enthralling and edifying, each chapter building to the moving finale. [See Prepub Alert, 11/30/15.]--Stephanie Sendaula, Library Journal

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.