Annie Proulx's enthralling, multigenerational epic, Barkskins, opens in 1693 in the vast North Woods of New France (now Canada) with the arrival from France of two indentured woodcutters, or "barkskins." René Sel feels with the first swings of his axe that he is "embarking on his life's work." But, blunted hatchet in hand, the ailing Charles Duquet can only nibble at his first tree. Duquet soon flees into the forest, changes his name to Duke and reappears as the canny founder of a Boston-based timber empire. Sel falls in love with a Mi'kmaw woman and fathers three children who mostly view themselves as native people.

The remainder of this 700-plus-page novel follows the lives of the Sel and Duke descendants up until 2013. The story unfolds against a background of social and political upheavals, beginning with the French and Indian war and ending with contemporary environmental conflicts. The Sels struggle to maintain a native culture as the natural world is altered by forces in which, for their own livelihoods, they must participate. The more powerful Duke family, whose timber interests eventually range throughout the world, has its own set of tragedies—and comedies.

Proulx's human characters—their lives and deaths—are vividly conceived. Her portrayals of them are nuanced. In a recent interview, Proulx said she has been thinking about and researching this book for many years. It shows. Barkskins brims with a granular sense of human experience over a period of 300 years. And like many novels by excellent writers, Barkskins encourages understanding, if not empathy, for characters whose outlooks we might usually dismiss. The idea that the vast forests of North America could never be diminished, for example, is expressed often by her early characters. With hindsight, we scoff at such a notion today. But Proulx allows us to feel the reasonableness and need for such an outlook at the time, making us question our easy assumptions about people of the past.

And yet the most moving and most consistent character of Barkskins is the world's forests. One of the great achievements of this novel is to create a sort of tragic personality for the environment. Proulx's beautiful prose renders an exultant view of the life of forest worlds lost to us, in both their grandeur and their indifferent menace. It will be very difficult for someone to finish reading Barkskins without a deep sense of loss.

 

This article was originally published in the July 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Grand in scale, somber in message, Barkskins, Annie Proulx's sprawling historical novel, is an old-fashioned tale of exploration and discovery that chronicles the destruction of the world's forests. The novel follows the fortunes of René Sel and Charles Duquet, two poor Frenchmen in 17th-­century Canada who become woodcutters, or barkskins. Sel marries a Mi'kmaw woman and fights to eke out a life, while Duquet goes on to start a timber enterprise. The book tracks their descendants as they struggle to survive in far-flung locales, including New Zealand and China, deforesting every region they enter and clashing with native cultures along the way. Proulx spins this epic tale all the way into the present day. Her richly developed characters, including Duquet's great-grandson, James Duke, who continues the family timber business, and his smart, resourceful daughter, Lavinia, keep the book from being preachy or pedagogic. This is a rewarding read from a world-class writer that's sure to get book clubs talking.

FAMILY MONEY
One of the biggest debuts of 2016, Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney's shrewdly observed novel, The Nest, is the story of the Plumb siblings and their struggles over an anticipated inheritance. Melody, Jack and Beatrice have a face-off with their brash, irresponsible brother, Leo, whose car accident (involving lots of alcohol and a teenage waitress) has imperiled their shared trust fund, which they refer to as "the nest." Each Plumb sibling needs the money to solve a particular problem. Melody is contending with a mortgage and her daughters' college tuition, while Jack is hoping for a bailout on funds he borrowed to keep his antique store afloat. Aspiring writer Beatrice, meanwhile, needs all the help she can get as she wrestles with her first novel. The story of how the Plumbs resolve the matter of the nest makes for a funny, poignant family saga. Sweeney writes convincingly about domestic feuds and sibling dynamics. This is a delightful debut from a writer of great promise.

TOP PICK FOR BOOK CLUBS
Nearly two years after it was first released, Anthony Doerr's All the Light We Cannot See arrives in paperback this month. The Pulitzer Prize-winning novel follows the lives of two characters during World War II in Europe. Werner is a German orphan who—thanks to his remarkable facility for math—is placed in a special Nazi school. ­Marie-Laure, a young blind girl, lives in Paris with her father. When the war escalates, Marie-Laure and her father flee to Saint-Malo, a walled city in Brittany where they have relatives involved in the French Resistance. Werner, meanwhile, rises through the ranks of Hitler Youth to become a Resistance tracker. When he arrives in Saint-Malo, he connects with Marie-Laure, and their lives change forever. Doerr's beautifully rendered novel has all the makings of a classic. Poetic, compassionate and compelling, it's a book that will stand the test of time.

This article was originally published in the April 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

It's hardly surprising to see the author of the Pulitzer Prize- and National Book Award-winning The Shipping News turn out something so grand. Proulx starts off in the late 1600s with illiterate woodsmen Rene Sel and Charles Duquet, who abandon northern France for New France. Rene marries a Native healer, Duquet eventually travels worldwide as he launches a prosperous logging company, and the narrative weaves together the descendants of both men, plus those of their friends and enemies, as it shows how immeasurably hard life was at the time.

René Sel and Charles Duquet arrive in New France in the 1600s, penniless woodcutters bound to a seigneur (feudal lord), longing for freedom. Duquet escapes to Boston then Amsterdam while Sel is forced to marry Mari, a Mi'kmaw servant. Pulitzer Prize-winning Proulx (The Shipping News; Brokeback Mountain) traces the interconnected Sel and Duquet families through the centuries. Charles changes his surname to Duke and adopts three orphans in addition to having a son, Outger, with his wife, Cornelia. The disappearance of Charles and news of Beatrix—a daughter of Outger living in the Duquet homestead on Penobscot Bay with Kuntaw Sel, grandson of René—galvanizes the adopted sons to subdue a métis claim to fortune. Jinot Sel, who suffers at logging camps in Maine and New Brunswick, finds an enigmatic benefactor. Headstrong Lavinia Duke relocates the business from Boston to Chicago in the 1880s and marries rival Dieter Breitsprecher. Then Dieter's children sell the company after World War II. The Sels dwindle on reservations, wistfully watching their disappearing culture, unaware of their kin. VERDICT Proulx's intricate, powerful meditation on colonialism is both enthralling and edifying, each chapter building to the moving finale. [See Prepub Alert, 11/30/15.]—Stephanie Sendaula, Library Journal

Reviewed by Gabe HabashVery long novels have perennially commanded our attention—Donna Tartt, Marlon James, Hanya Yanagihara, and Garth Risk Hallberg have written four of the most discussed novels of the past three years; they are all more than 700 pages. But Annie Proulx's Barkskins is remarkable not just for its length, but for its scope and ambition—it spans more than 300 years and includes a cast of dozens. It's a monumental achievement, one that will perhaps be remembered as her finest work. Structured in 10 novella-length sections, the book begins with two Frenchmen, René Sel and Charles Duquet, who arrive in New France (now Canada) in 1693 to work for a local seigneur in exchange for land. The first section is about Sel, a born woodsman who fathers three children with Mari, a Mi'kmaq woman. The second follows Duquet, the wilier of the two, who runs away and, snatching up tracts of woodlands in the northeast, founds a timber company in Boston called Duke & Sons. The subsequent sections alternate between each man's bloodline, tracing displacement, resettlement, and death, finishing in 2013. The descendants of Sel battle the erosion of Mi'kmaq culture (at the book's end, their number dips below 1,500), often struggling to adapt as Europeans flood North America, while the Mi'kmaq drift and take labor jobs as they are uprooted. Among the Sels are Achille, René Sel's son and a master hunter, who goes on a moose hunt but finds English soldiers waiting when he returns home, and Jinot, a Sel descendant further down the line, who finds himself cutting huge kauri on an ill-fated journey to New Zealand. Meanwhile, Duquet's descendants take up the family business. James Duke, Duquet's great grandson whose "future flickered before him as a likely series of disappointments," pushes west to find new sources of timber. And James's daughter, the hungry and enterprising Lavinia, perhaps the book's most memorable character, brings unprecedented growth during her time at the helm. The middle of the book can become a bit overwhelming, as the reader attempts to juggle all the new characters and story lines Proulx introduces, but, as in the best epics, the later pages are weighted with all that's come before. Decisions and incidences have ramifications that pop back up again, often hundreds of years later, in astonishing ways. In relating character to setting, repeatedly showing how one influences the other, there are shades of Steinbeck's East of Eden. But the forests are decimated, and characters are summarily, violently dispatched, often offstage. And as years pass in the space of a few pages, it becomes clear that history and time are the main characters here, each moment incremental and nearly insignificant in and of itself, but essential in shaping the world that emerges at the story's conclusion. It's exhilarating to read Proulx, a master storyteller; she is as adept at placing us in the dripping, cold Mi'kma'ki forests as in the stuffy Duke & Sons parlors. Despite the length, nothing seems extraneous, and not once does the reader sense the story slipping from Proulx's grasp, resulting in the kind of immersive reading experience that only comes along every few years. Gabe Habash is the deputy reviews editor of Publishers Weekly. His debut novel is forthcoming from Coffee House Press.