That Old Ace in the Hole was published by Charles Scribner’s Sons in 2002. Bob Dollar, a young man from Denver with no particular skills or ambitions, is hired by Global Pork Rind to scout the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles for potential sites for large-scale hog farms. His job is to find desperate ranchers willing to sell their land — or at least lease it for the confined animal feeding operations that will destroy the landscape, the water table, and the community but will generate enormous profits for the corporation.
Bob arrives in Woolybucket, Texas, and is immediately absorbed into a community of characters who, in Proulx’s rendering, are simultaneously eccentric, resilient, and doomed. LaVon Fronk, his landlady, is an amateur historian obsessed with the panhandle’s past; the local ranchers are hanging on by their fingernails, battered by drought, debt, and declining commodity prices; and the landscape — flat, wind-scoured, enormous — is both beautiful and inhospitable.
The novel is Proulx’s most comic work: the panhandle characters are drawn with affection and exaggeration, and the interpolated histories of the region (told by LaVon, who is compiling a local history) are simultaneously informative and absurd. But the comedy contains a serious argument: industrial agriculture — specifically the confined hog operations that transformed the American Midwest and South in the 1990s — is destroying rural communities more effectively than drought or depression ever did, and the people being destroyed have no effective way to resist.
Collecting That Old Ace in the Hole
First edition (Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 2002): Hardcover with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $15–$35
- Very good: $8–$20