Postcards was published by Charles Scribner’s Sons in 1992 — Proulx’s first novel, published when she was fifty-seven (she had previously published nonfiction and short stories). The novel opens with Loyal Blood burying the body of Billy, the girl he has accidentally killed during a sexual encounter, in a field on the family farm in Vermont. He flees — and does not return for the rest of the novel, which spans four decades and takes him across the American landscape: working on ranches, in mines, on oil rigs, as a trapper, a gold prospector, and a drifter.
Meanwhile, the Blood family falls apart. Loyal’s departure removes the most capable member of the farming household, and the farm — already marginal, already being squeezed by mechanization and consolidation — cannot survive without him. His father dies; his mother goes into a nursing home; his brother Dub is maimed in a tractor accident; his sister Mernelle makes a bad marriage. Each chapter begins with a postcard — sometimes from Loyal, sometimes from other characters — that provides a compressed, fragmentary glimpse of a life in transit.
Proulx’s subject is the destruction of small-farm America — not as a nostalgic lament but as a documented process: the economic forces, the technological changes, the social transformations that made subsistence farming in New England impossible by the mid-twentieth century. Loyal’s flight from murder is also, metaphorically, a flight from the farm itself: he is running from a way of life that is dying, and his wandering across the American West is a search for something to replace it.
Collecting Postcards
First edition (Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1992): Hardcover with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $75–$200
- Very good: $30–$75
- Signed: $150–$400