A review by bookly_reads
Barkskins, by Annie Proulx
5.0
As a brick-sized paperback in my hand Barkskins felt like a thing utterly of the Earth, and it took me through the span of an oak tree’s life, forcing me to watch its human characters grow and die and grow and die again. I would most compare it to Octavia Butler’s multi-generational Lilith’s Brood trilogy, which is the only other story that has made the emotional truths of colonization so real to me. Barkskins was not a page-turner, but I feel entirely enriched by it and wish it could somehow be condensed so that it could be realistically implemented in American English or history lessons. But it can’t be condensed: The broad brushstrokes of history come forth as emotional truths only when rendered in this exquisitely well-researched detail.
Barkskins made me really feel how inevitable the hypercapitalism of America was once the settlers came, as the hardiest and most psychopathic of our white ancestors flourished in their self-created systems of corruption, dominating those who would live more modest but less harmful lives. The impossible trials of the Native Americans/First Nations peoples feel realer to me as well, as I could grasp the utter futility of trying to salvage back the “old ways” in the midst of an ongoing genocide. Through this book I felt more clearly what it might be like to be left so entirely without options, and then blamed for your own hard lot in life.
At the same time, anyone still under the impression that Europeans are the world’s great innovators is disproven heartily by Annie Proulx’s laying out of the absolute idiocy of most of the settlers:
“The forests are infinite and permanent.”
“God’s sake, how on earth does [someone] ‘manage’ a forest? Cut ’em down!”
During one point a settler is asked about the future of America’s forests, about complex topics like erosion and old growth vs. plantations. Repeatedly his answer is to merely assign the fate of the entire continent to God’s will. It is as if Christianity completely numbed their minds, made their brains impenetrable to all curiosity or wisdom. Later Egga, a Mi’kmaw boy whose parents sent him to a residential school in the hopes that he could assimilate and ascend of ladder of social mobility, is treated viciously and assaulted by “genocidal nuns and priests. The children [who went to the residential schools] were never again wholly Mi’kmaw.” All of this savage behavior paints the Europeans as brutes in a way I was perfectly aware of factually but had never felt to my core emotionally. This is the highest purpose of fiction.
I also now see so much of our past in our present. The thoughts of the greedy head of a lumber company, rich from inherited wealth, could easily be applied to many situations today:
She urged editors to praise the manliness and toughness of shanty men, inculcating axmen with the belief that they could take extreme risks and withstand the most desperate conditions because they were heroic rugged fellows; the same sauce served settlers into the third generation, who believed they were “pioneers” and could outlast perils and adversities. Loggers and frontier settlers, she thought, would live on pride and belief in their own invulnerability instead of money.
I think about our overworked and underpaid teachers and doctors being praised constantly as superhuman “heroes.” Lavinia Duke’s mindset also seems perfectly comparable to Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk, men so unfathomably greedy they wish to leave our ravaged Earth behind to exploit the solar system.
These are just my first meandering thoughts. Again: Barkskins isn’t a page-turner, but I’m very glad to have read it. As companion reads I highly recommend Richard Powers’s The Overstory and Octavia Butler’s aforementioned Lilith’s Brood.
Barkskins made me really feel how inevitable the hypercapitalism of America was once the settlers came, as the hardiest and most psychopathic of our white ancestors flourished in their self-created systems of corruption, dominating those who would live more modest but less harmful lives. The impossible trials of the Native Americans/First Nations peoples feel realer to me as well, as I could grasp the utter futility of trying to salvage back the “old ways” in the midst of an ongoing genocide. Through this book I felt more clearly what it might be like to be left so entirely without options, and then blamed for your own hard lot in life.
At the same time, anyone still under the impression that Europeans are the world’s great innovators is disproven heartily by Annie Proulx’s laying out of the absolute idiocy of most of the settlers:
“The forests are infinite and permanent.”
“God’s sake, how on earth does [someone] ‘manage’ a forest? Cut ’em down!”
During one point a settler is asked about the future of America’s forests, about complex topics like erosion and old growth vs. plantations. Repeatedly his answer is to merely assign the fate of the entire continent to God’s will. It is as if Christianity completely numbed their minds, made their brains impenetrable to all curiosity or wisdom. Later Egga, a Mi’kmaw boy whose parents sent him to a residential school in the hopes that he could assimilate and ascend of ladder of social mobility, is treated viciously and assaulted by “genocidal nuns and priests. The children [who went to the residential schools] were never again wholly Mi’kmaw.” All of this savage behavior paints the Europeans as brutes in a way I was perfectly aware of factually but had never felt to my core emotionally. This is the highest purpose of fiction.
I also now see so much of our past in our present. The thoughts of the greedy head of a lumber company, rich from inherited wealth, could easily be applied to many situations today:
She urged editors to praise the manliness and toughness of shanty men, inculcating axmen with the belief that they could take extreme risks and withstand the most desperate conditions because they were heroic rugged fellows; the same sauce served settlers into the third generation, who believed they were “pioneers” and could outlast perils and adversities. Loggers and frontier settlers, she thought, would live on pride and belief in their own invulnerability instead of money.
I think about our overworked and underpaid teachers and doctors being praised constantly as superhuman “heroes.” Lavinia Duke’s mindset also seems perfectly comparable to Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk, men so unfathomably greedy they wish to leave our ravaged Earth behind to exploit the solar system.
These are just my first meandering thoughts. Again: Barkskins isn’t a page-turner, but I’m very glad to have read it. As companion reads I highly recommend Richard Powers’s The Overstory and Octavia Butler’s aforementioned Lilith’s Brood.