Tilting at Windmills

Ann

ie Proulx has the number worked out. "Wyoming has 2.1 people per square mile," she tells you. Whether or not she has her math right, it would be fair to say that it represents her notion of congenial population density. After living long and hard in 13 small towns in Vermont, with regular excursions to a house she still keeps in Newfoundland — a place for people who think Maine is overcrowded — she has put down for some years in Centennial, Wyo., a microscopic settlement west of Laramie at the foot of the Medicine Bow Mountains. Just outside town there's a sign that claims the place has pop. 100. That estimate might be a little steep.

At 67, after three husbands, four children, two volumes of short stories and four novels — including one, The Shipping News, that won her the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award — Proulx (rhymes with true) lives on her own in a well-timbered house on an unmarked dirt road. As you would expect from a successful writer whose books are full of cherry cobbler and sliced elk, she has one of those restaurant-quality stoves that in a pinch could double as an armored car. But on the whole, Proulx is more Annie Oakley than Betty Crocker. She can handle an ax and a canoe. Her hair looks as if she cut it herself with a hunting knife. Do not doubt that she has one.

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And unless you happen to be a windmill repairman, she also knows a whole lot more than you do about old water-pumping windmills. When she started work on her sly new novel, That Old Ace in the Hole (Scribner; 384 pages), she thought it would center on windmills and the people who work on them in the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles. "For years I've drifted through there on the way to other places," she says in her agreeably settled but sometimes impish voice. "There were these dilapidated places with windmills facedown in the yard and a general air of dishevelment. Or you'd see huge, golden, grassy fields and a windmill way out yonder. I made up my mind that one of these days I would write about the Panhandle and the windmills."

That was before she learned how completely the old windmills had been supplanted by pumps that drink from the deep and fast depleting Ogallala Aquifer, or how much the region has been penetrated by giant hog farms, corporate operations that can leach toxic waste into the water table and foul the air for miles with burning stink. So now her main character is Bob Dollar, a young man who comes to the Panhandle from Colorado to secretly scout locations for Global Pork Rind, an outfit based in Tokyo that wants to start vast hog farms. As you might expect, Dollar goes native. Along the way, he and the reader learn about skies "the color of cold tea" and endlessly shape-shifting weather. They find their way around places where the wet heat falls on you "like a barber's towel," where a meticulous local looks like a man "who spent his formative years in a trouser press" and where a cagey old woman brushes off Dollar's suspicious flatteries with "I have discovered that young men's blandishments are simply too much pie."

"For me, it's the place that comes first," says Proulx, "the topography and climate. The story falls out of that." So does the longtime local economy, usually retreating in the face of the modern world, and the local speech. (Proulx's dialogue reminds you that there still is such a thing, even in Wal-Marted and Starbucked America.) Not content to be confined to one place, she's that odd literary bird, an itinerant regionalist, a writer who moves from one locale to another but in each setting nests until she makes it her own. Without intending to, she has become a bit like James Michener but with a more bewitching prose style and no disposition to pound along for 600 pages. For Ace she made repeated and sometimes months-long trips to the Panhandle. "Moving and drifting," she says. "And eavesdropping."

She learned a lot. In a novel full of riffs on vintage plastic jewelry, you can even learn how to distinguish a genuine Bakelite necklace from mere acrylic. (Check for the telltale musty smell of phenol.) The book has its shortcomings. The plot moseys a bit. Some of the characters are too fleeting to stick in the mind. But Ace is like one of those genuine Bakelite jewels. It gives off the odor of the real thing.