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A review by joakley
Barkskins by Annie Proulx
4.0
On the front cover there is a quote from the San Francisco Chronicle praising Barkskins as “perhaps the greatest environmental novel ever written.” Now. That’s a big sentence. First of all it is extremely high praise. The claim of greatest ANYTHING ever made is a lot to back up, and while I haven’t read every environmental novel ever written, I can confirm that this book is great. Secondly, this claim puts Barkskins in a certain framework as an “environmental novel.” When I read that categorization, I was admittedly slightly nervous. Before reading Barkskins, I would have said that an environmental novel can basically be understood as a tree-hugger novel. I was nervous to read this long book and have the only takeaway be something as reducible and simple as “Save the Trees.” But what makes Barkskins so great is that it takes its environmentalist aspects so seriously. It takes that topic and reveals its true complexity, not with the intention of shaming the reader, but with the intention of developing an intellectual account of the story between people and nature. Environmentalism never has been just about tree-hugging, and for me to be nervous about that shows how ignorant I can be lol oops. As Barkskins shows us, environmentalism is about humanity’s strange connection to nature, the overwhelming power and longevity of the Earth, and figuring out our own identity in the context of the natural world, both as individuals and parts of a community. As this novel unfolds Annie Proulx explores all of these questions and more, and at every turn simultaneously opens up the complexity of these issues and leaves them open to uncertainty.
Barkskins is about two families, not two characters, so you can only truly know them when you step back and see the whole picture. Rene Sel and Charles Duquet are the heads of both of these families, and they come to the New World in 1693 on the same boat to work the field of a wealthy landowner. In both of them we get fairly simple, face-value descriptions. Sel is a man who does not forge his own path, he is someone who gets told what to do, and just goes with the flow. Duquet is a schemer, he is driven by the idea of accruing land and wealth and he will lie, cheat, and deceive his way there. These two men really aren’t all that important; Barkskins is an exploration of what those characteristics look like when they are drawn out over hundreds of years, across generations. Some of the descendants are eerily similar to these figureheads, and some of them deviate greatly, but the reader is not concerned only with those individuals, we get to dig into the story of the greater trajectory of the Sel and Duke (Charles Duquet Americanizes his name to Duke) lineages and the relationship those families have to the wilderness of the New World
This generational format is a gratifying experience as a reader, but it takes patience. Beatrix is a descendant of Rene Sel, and like the rest of that family, she is half French and half Mi’kmaq – Native American. Also like many of her family members, she struggles to establish her own identity as she is torn between the two cultures. And when she tries to explain this feeling, someone points out to her that “you could not hope to grasp the meanings except by living the entire life.” Beatrix was never fully living in the woods and learning the culture of her American side, and she never lived in France or got a proper education or reaped the benefits of European society. This struggle for identity and the quest to establish a name for oneself maps onto the slow, generational pace of the novel. To truly understand each family you must live through each of their lives fully. Much of the fun of reading is working through complex characterizations of the figures in the novel. In Barkskins this feeling is multiplied tenfold, as you get to do that for each individual, and then again as you piece each individual together to form your concept of the entire family. This puzzle work is a unique reading adventure that I can’t say I have experienced before.
Proulx holds all these familial threads together at the same time that she writes a complex account of humanity’s relation to nature. The message is not just that we are chopping trees down blindly and depleting our resources. It is that we are intimately tied to nature, and when we prioritize capital and modern notions of economic progress, we are undermining that relationship. The tone is somewhat condemning but never oversteps or feels preachy. Proulx deals the story with a blunt delivery, and the narrative always feels sincere and true. While the tone may condemn modernization and capitalism, it also shows that all types of people are caught in this web. Even the Sels, who we would expect to be more in accord with the woods, feel disconnected from it. While families like the Dukes fund mass termination of entire woodlands, the workhands like the Sels are the ones doing the physical labor of cutting the trees so they can make some money of their own. And even when we are one with nature, we are in grave danger. To live in the wild is to accept the fact that outside forces may kill you at any moment, and this is expressed again and again by the men and women who are taken down by errant trees, wildfires, natural predators, and countless other dangers in the woods. Men live and die in single paragraphs in Barkskins. We can attempt to tame the wild, and while this may lead to profit, it also distorts both Sels and Duquets in dark, mysterious ways. This is all to say that at every turn humanity is inextricably mixed up with the Earth, and most of the ways in which we decide to deal with this lead to turmoil.
There are no easy conclusions in Barkskins. None of the content that Proulx dives into is simple or one-sided. The matter-of-fact manner in which she delivers this complex tale is meant to show that regardless of how we take it, this is the way it is. Something about our relationship with nature has been poisoned, and something about how nature views us has changed irrevocably. As a reader, the journey into this dilemma feels like a satisfying investigation, but the conclusion is one that we can expect, and it is rather depressing. As Charley Duke notes, “humankind is evolving into a terrible new species and I am sorry that I am one of them.” Both Sel and Duke fit into this equation, and as the novel reaches its conclusion in 2013, the descendants of these essentially cursed characters begin to put that together as well. It is all so complicated, like trying to patch up a broken relationship but split into a million little pieces. The imperative is to recognize how important it is to at least try to improve our relationship with nature, it’s just that “I can’t find the words to say how important.”
Disclaimer: I covered about 1/100th of the interesting content in this novel in the above review.
Barkskins is about two families, not two characters, so you can only truly know them when you step back and see the whole picture. Rene Sel and Charles Duquet are the heads of both of these families, and they come to the New World in 1693 on the same boat to work the field of a wealthy landowner. In both of them we get fairly simple, face-value descriptions. Sel is a man who does not forge his own path, he is someone who gets told what to do, and just goes with the flow. Duquet is a schemer, he is driven by the idea of accruing land and wealth and he will lie, cheat, and deceive his way there. These two men really aren’t all that important; Barkskins is an exploration of what those characteristics look like when they are drawn out over hundreds of years, across generations. Some of the descendants are eerily similar to these figureheads, and some of them deviate greatly, but the reader is not concerned only with those individuals, we get to dig into the story of the greater trajectory of the Sel and Duke (Charles Duquet Americanizes his name to Duke) lineages and the relationship those families have to the wilderness of the New World
This generational format is a gratifying experience as a reader, but it takes patience. Beatrix is a descendant of Rene Sel, and like the rest of that family, she is half French and half Mi’kmaq – Native American. Also like many of her family members, she struggles to establish her own identity as she is torn between the two cultures. And when she tries to explain this feeling, someone points out to her that “you could not hope to grasp the meanings except by living the entire life.” Beatrix was never fully living in the woods and learning the culture of her American side, and she never lived in France or got a proper education or reaped the benefits of European society. This struggle for identity and the quest to establish a name for oneself maps onto the slow, generational pace of the novel. To truly understand each family you must live through each of their lives fully. Much of the fun of reading is working through complex characterizations of the figures in the novel. In Barkskins this feeling is multiplied tenfold, as you get to do that for each individual, and then again as you piece each individual together to form your concept of the entire family. This puzzle work is a unique reading adventure that I can’t say I have experienced before.
Proulx holds all these familial threads together at the same time that she writes a complex account of humanity’s relation to nature. The message is not just that we are chopping trees down blindly and depleting our resources. It is that we are intimately tied to nature, and when we prioritize capital and modern notions of economic progress, we are undermining that relationship. The tone is somewhat condemning but never oversteps or feels preachy. Proulx deals the story with a blunt delivery, and the narrative always feels sincere and true. While the tone may condemn modernization and capitalism, it also shows that all types of people are caught in this web. Even the Sels, who we would expect to be more in accord with the woods, feel disconnected from it. While families like the Dukes fund mass termination of entire woodlands, the workhands like the Sels are the ones doing the physical labor of cutting the trees so they can make some money of their own. And even when we are one with nature, we are in grave danger. To live in the wild is to accept the fact that outside forces may kill you at any moment, and this is expressed again and again by the men and women who are taken down by errant trees, wildfires, natural predators, and countless other dangers in the woods. Men live and die in single paragraphs in Barkskins. We can attempt to tame the wild, and while this may lead to profit, it also distorts both Sels and Duquets in dark, mysterious ways. This is all to say that at every turn humanity is inextricably mixed up with the Earth, and most of the ways in which we decide to deal with this lead to turmoil.
There are no easy conclusions in Barkskins. None of the content that Proulx dives into is simple or one-sided. The matter-of-fact manner in which she delivers this complex tale is meant to show that regardless of how we take it, this is the way it is. Something about our relationship with nature has been poisoned, and something about how nature views us has changed irrevocably. As a reader, the journey into this dilemma feels like a satisfying investigation, but the conclusion is one that we can expect, and it is rather depressing. As Charley Duke notes, “humankind is evolving into a terrible new species and I am sorry that I am one of them.” Both Sel and Duke fit into this equation, and as the novel reaches its conclusion in 2013, the descendants of these essentially cursed characters begin to put that together as well. It is all so complicated, like trying to patch up a broken relationship but split into a million little pieces. The imperative is to recognize how important it is to at least try to improve our relationship with nature, it’s just that “I can’t find the words to say how important.”
Disclaimer: I covered about 1/100th of the interesting content in this novel in the above review.