SOURCE: McGee, Celia. “Hearing Music.” Nation 262, no. 25 (24 June 1996): 29–31.

In the following review, McGee praises Accordion Crimes, calling the work a “mighty, searing reflection on U.S. ethnic history.”

Ours is a billboard culture. Giant signs may no longer line every highway, but we still like our labels writ large, especially when it comes to people. American advertisements for the self identify as well as pigeonhole in the ostensibly democratic, egalitarian society dreamt up by a bunch of Europeans fleeing tyranny, hierarchies and silly dress codes. Well, dream on. Take the accordion. Put that in American hands and they might as well be waving a sign that the snobbish will read as “Low Rent,” “Low Life,” “Lower Middle Class.”

E. Annie Proulx's new novel, Accordion Crimes, is a lyrically butt-kicking antidote to the assumption (mine, too) that the accordion's only crime is that it was ever invented in the...