SOURCE: Busch, Frederick. “A Desperate Perceptiveness.” Chicago Tribune Books (12 January 1992): 1.

In the following excerpt, Busch praises Postcards as a “powerful novel” about “powerful matters.”

You have to start somewhere. And though the term “first novel” is often used not only to indicate the beginning of a novelist's career but also to suggest a shapelessness (or a shape created by autobiography), a fumbling with language or a surrender to the overmuch poetry of a young soul, and an inability to manage more than two characters, we must remind ourselves that The Sun Also Rises was a first novel, as was Pickwick Papers and Wise Blood.

In the beginning—with the very good ones—there is story. E. Annie Proulx has studied her America and her own soul, and she has invented a story large enough to get lost in and to want to get lost in. She has achieved...