Barkskins was published by Charles Scribner’s Sons in 2016 — Proulx’s longest and most ambitious novel, spanning over 700 pages and more than three hundred years. The novel follows the descendants of two men who arrive in New France (present-day Quebec) in 1693 as indentured servants to a French seigneur: René Sel, a poor Frenchman, and Charles Duquet, a shrewd and ruthless opportunist.
Their descendants diverge: the Sels intermarry with the Mi’kmaq people and remain connected to the land, eventually becoming involved in conservation and forestry science; the Duquets (later anglicized to Duke) build a timber empire, clear-cutting their way across the continent from Quebec to Maine to the Pacific Northwest to New Zealand. The two family lines — one exploiting the forest, the other trying to preserve it — represent the two sides of humanity’s relationship to the natural world.
Proulx’s research is encyclopedic: the novel contains detailed accounts of colonial-era logging techniques, 18th-century woodcraft, 19th-century industrial sawmilling, 20th-century pulp and paper manufacturing, and 21st-century corporate forestry. Each generation’s chapter is steeped in the specific technologies, economics, and ecological realities of its period. The cumulative effect is of an environmental history of North America told through human lives — a record of destruction so comprehensive that the reader cannot help but feel the weight of what has been lost.
The novel’s ecological argument is not polemical but structural: Proulx shows, generation by generation, how the logic of extraction operates — how each generation takes more than the last, how the forest’s apparent inexhaustibility conceals its fragility, and how the people who profit from destruction are always elsewhere when the consequences arrive.
Collecting Barkskins
First edition (Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 2016): Hardcover with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $15–$35
- Very good: $8–$20