Five Book Reviews That Matter This Week: Proulx, Gass, Vollmann

Dwight Garner calls Annie Proulx "an American eccentric" whose career-spanning collection Stories: New & Selected reads like a junk shop spilling onto your dog. The review roundup, compiled by Book Marks (Lit Hub's review aggregator), covers five titles this week: Proulx's Stories, Louise Kennedy's Stations, William Gass's The Tunnel, Tom Drury's West of Loveland, and William T. Vollmann's A Table for Fortune.

What are critics actually saying?

Dwight Garner on Annie Proulx, Stories: New & Selected (The New York Times). Garner frames Proulx as a maximalist: "She's a putter-inner, not a taker-outer." He catalogs the violence freighted into her fiction — chain-saw accidents, deaths by emu claws, freelance castration, kids trapped in mine shafts — and compares the effect to falling into Michael Lesy's Wisconsin Death Trip. He places her among "the great, clanking accumulators": James Joyce's associations, Gustav Klimt's encrusted paint, Charles Ives's polytonalities. If Stephen King is a Big Mac and fries, Garner writes, Proulx is "a platter of gizzards, chicken feet and deviled kidneys." He means it as praise.

Clare Clark on Louise Kennedy's Stations (The Guardian). Clark reads the novel — a diary-structured story of a relationship across 25 years, with echoes of David Nicholls's One Day — as a portrait of the Irish diaspora in a grim 1980s London of squats and payphones. Her verdict: "a furious, tender, potty-mouthed paean to loyalty and generosity of spirit," and an elegy to "a generation of lost Irish boys." The title carries a double weight: the transience of trains and boats, and the Stations of the Cross. Kennedy's questions, Clark writes, "will burn themselves into your heart."

John Semly on William Gass's The Tunnel (The Nation). The news here is bibliographic: Dalkey Archive has reprinted the decades-in-the-making novel in full color, as Gass intended, with a companion volume, The Tunnel Reader. Used copies had regularly fetched hundreds of dollars. Semly calls the book "intimidating and frustrating and brilliant," and reads it as a study of what Gass terms "the fascism of the heart." His sharpest formulation: it's "as if Proust wrote The Turner Diaries." Everything in the novel happens inside the narrator Kohler's mind — a consciousness that literally digs a tunnel under his basement office.

Daniel Mason on Tom Drury's West of Loveland (The New York Times). Mason opens with Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha and maps Drury's Grouse County onto that tradition — a fictional cosmos anchored by a frontispiece map marking the Swedish House, the Earring, and the Gates of Hell. Readers of Drury's three earlier Grouse County novels will meet old friends, but the book stands alone. Mason invokes Irving Howe's 1953 defense of "writers of sweetness," who "do not assume evil to be the last word about man."

Nick Holdstock on William T. Vollmann's A Table for Fortune (The Guardian). The biggest object of the week: a 3,000-page novel in four simultaneously published volumes, 15 years in the making. Holdstock calls it "an epic attempt" to reckon with the American experiment in its 250th year, pairing a family story with an insider's history of the CIA — narrated partly by the agency's own "relentlessly sardonic" institutional voice. He compares its day-to-day accumulation of history to Uwe Johnson's Anniversaries: "a car crash in super-slow motion." The book offers no definitive answers on freedom versus the state. "Where would be the fun in that?"

What does this week tell us?

The common thread is scale and difficulty. Three of the five books are either very long, very dense, or newly rescued from out-of-print obscurity. Critics keep rewarding maximalism — Vollmann's four volumes and Gass's full-color resurrection prove publishers will still bet on it. The semiquincentennial framing of A Table for Fortune suggests that America's 250th anniversary is becoming a literary occasion, and more publishers are likely to follow.