Heart Songs and Other Stories was published by Charles Scribner’s Sons in 1988 — Proulx’s first book of fiction, published when she was fifty-three. The stories are set in rural New England, primarily Vermont and New Hampshire, and they establish the territory Proulx would mine for the rest of her career: the lives of people living close to the land, in poverty or near-poverty, whose skills (hunting, trapping, logging, farming) are being rendered obsolete by economic forces they cannot see or understand.
The title story, “Heart Songs,” follows a newcomer to a rural community — a man from the suburbs who romanticizes country life — as he is drawn into a family of musicians whose poverty and dysfunction he finds picturesque until it becomes dangerous. The pattern recurs throughout the collection: outsiders arrive in rural communities expecting pastoral simplicity and discover something harder, stranger, and more threatening. Proulx’s sympathy is entirely with the locals, whose lives she renders with an attention to physical detail — the texture of bark, the weight of a chainsaw, the sound of ice breaking on a pond — that dignifies their labor without sentimentalizing their poverty.
The prose style is already recognizably Proulx’s: compressed, imagistic, built on nouns rather than adjectives, with a rhythm that mirrors the clipped speech of the characters. The New England landscape — forests, stone walls, mud season, the particular quality of northern light — is as much a presence as any character.
Collecting Heart Songs
First edition (Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1988): Hardcover with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $75–$200
- Very good: $30–$75
- Signed: $150–$400