SOURCE: Grover, J. Z. “Play It Again, Annie.” Women's Review of Books 13, no. 12 (September 1996): 11.

In the following review of Accordion Crimes, Grover praises Proulx's authorial voice and prose skill, but notes that her characters, as emblematic figures, are to some extent trivialized.

Annie Proulx's latest excursion is one step forward and one step back. The novel's form is closer to that of her first, Postcards (1992), and its nightmare tour of American society, than it is to her second, The Shipping News (1993), in which Proulx's eye for all things scabrous and American was tempered somewhat by her subjects—stoic Newfoundlanders and an almost zomboid main character, Quoyle. (I do not say “protagonist” in mentioning Quoyle: Proulx could not be said to have protagonists, for the world happens to her characters rather than through them. Rights of creation she reserves to herself.)

Accordion Crimes, like Postcards, is a picaresque, a...