SOURCE: Sutherland, John. “The Long Journey.” New Republic 215, no. 15 (7 October 1996): 44–45.

In the following review, Sutherland evaluates the strengths of Accordion Crimes, noting that the collection “uses all the range and the resources of Proulx's mature prose.”

The praise for E. Annie Proulx's The Shipping News was unanimous and superlative. It won a string of important prizes. But literary history is littered with examples of authors stifled by their own success. When you suddenly find yourself at the top, where do you go?

One's curiosity about what Proulx would do next flows from the nature of her work. The Shipping News is a fine novel, and it will still look good seventy years from now—unlike, say, Edna Ferber's So Big, which also won a Pulitzer Prize. But it is, in the context of late twentieth-century American fiction, a strangely idiosyncratic performance. All writers, even the most original, have...