Accordion Crimes was published by Charles Scribner’s Sons in 1996. The novel is structured around a single object: a small green button accordion made by an Italian immigrant in 1890, who is lynched in New Orleans shortly after arriving in America. The accordion survives and passes through the hands of successive owners across the next century, each representing a different immigrant community: German farmers in Iowa, Polish steelworkers in Chicago, African American musicians in Mississippi, Cajun families in Louisiana, Tex-Mex laborers in Texas, and others.
Each section is essentially a self-contained novella — dense, detailed, and violent. Proulx does not sentimentalize the immigrant experience: her characters are exploited, discriminated against, and brutalized, but they are also capable of their own cruelty, and the communities they build are riven by the same hierarchies and prejudices they fled. The accordion connects them not through a shared narrative (the characters in different sections do not know each other) but through music — the one form of cultural expression that survives the grinding process of Americanization.
Proulx’s research is prodigious: each section is steeped in the specific details of its community’s history, labor, food, music, and speech. The German farming sections know the soil and the weather; the Cajun sections know the bayou and the crawfish boil; the Tex-Mex sections know the border and the migrant labor camps. The novel’s cumulative effect is of an alternative history of America told not through presidents and wars but through the music, labor, and suffering of the people who actually built the country.
Collecting Accordion Crimes
First edition (Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1996): Hardcover with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $25–$60
- Very good: $10–$25