I have a friend whose book club is spending the next six months dedicated to books about the American West. If I had known about it sooner, I would have suggested Annie Proulx's 2002 novel That Old Ace in the Hole. The American West of the interlocking Texas and Oklahoma panhandles is the true protagonist of Proulx's novel: silent, but always vividly present.
That Old Ace in the Hole is set in contemporary times, although Proulx is cagy about specifics. One character drives a Saturn, which fixes the narrative within the last 20 years. But in many ways, there is a timelessness to the book's setting of small, dusty, widely-scattered towns. A narrative thread of the cowboy history of the area is intertwined with present-day actual cowboys, who still ride horses and rope cattle and mend fencelines just like their predecessors from 100 years ago. The residents of Woolybucket and its neighboring towns still live much the same way they always have, with quilting bees, bake sales, and innumerable small town rivalries.
Although this part of the country is under constant threat from drought, oil barons, and the vagaries of the cattle market, the novel's main character comes bearing the standard flag of the newest threat: hog farms. Bob Dollar is a hapless, hopeless man who drifts through life until finding himself employed by Global Pork Rind as a property scout.
Bob Dollar's job is to convince people to sell their land to the hog farms. It's a tough sell, and it's one that Bob is thoroughly unprepared to handle. You wonder how he got the job in the first place, much less why he keeps it. Although the setting was gorgeous and the history fascinating, I found myself frustrated with Bob and far more interested in the brief glimpses we get of his competitor, Evelyn Chine, a cunning woman who is apparently willing to do whatever it takes to succeed at her job - and who pays the price for her ambition.
Image copyright Annie Proulx/Scribner
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