That Old Ace in the Hole : A Novel
by Annie Proulx
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Book Summary Information
Author: Annie ProulxEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2003-09-16
ISBN: 0743242483
Number of pages: 361
Publisher: Scribner
Book Reviews of That Old Ace in the Hole : A Novel
Book Review: The Unexceptional Made Exceptional
Summary: 5 Stars
Proulx has once again given us a captivating story about the most mundane and unexceptional set of circumstances imaginable.
In this story we have Bob Dollar, a young man who has lived much of his life without purpose, suddenly hired by Global Pork Rind to scout out possible hog farm locations in the Texas Panhandle. Though he doesn't care one iota about the hog farming industry and he personally thinks that hog farms ruin the quality of life wherever they spring up, he is determined to complete his job because so many people in his past have left things unfinished. Little did he know that in investigating the lands and people he hopes will sell out, he would build relationships with both not easily set aside.
Though Proulx gives us a story devoid of any major action or catastrophe, she nails every aspect of what it means to be a human with inexplicable emotions and passions, and I can only imagine that if I were to visit the Texas Panhandle, the people from this novel would likely be who I would meet.
Her usual aptitude for ingenuous dialogue, wit, and charm exude from the pages of this work. Her characters, as easy to imagine as your next-door neighbor, grow on you despite all their quirks and shortcomings (perhaps also like your next-door neighbor). I thoroughly enjoyed reading this novel and suspect that you will as well.
~Scott William Foley, author of Souls Triumphant
Summary of That Old Ace in the Hole : A Novel
From Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner Annie Proulx comes That Old Ace in the Hole, an exhilarating story brimming with language, history, landscape, music, and love.Bob Dollar is a young man from Denver trying to make good in a bad world. Out of college and aimless, Dollar takes a job with Global Pork Rind, scouting out big spreads of land that can be converted to hog farms. Soon he's holed up in a two-bit Texas town called Woolybucket, where he settles into LaVon Fronk's old bunkhouse for fifty dollars a month, helps out at Cy Frease's Old Dog Café, and learns the hard way how vigorously the old Texas ranch owners will hold on to their land, even when their children want no part of it.
Robust, often bawdy, strikingly original, That Old Ace in the Hole traces the waves of change that have shaped the American West over the past century -- and in Bob Dollar, Proulx has created one of the most irrepressible characters in contemporary fiction.
Bob Dollar is a reluctant land swindler. When the 25-year-old protagonist in Annie Proulx's That Old Ace in the Hole signs on as a location scout for Global Pork Rind, an industrial hog farming corporation, he has no idea what kind of moral quandaries he's in for. Well, maybe he does. His assignment, after all, is to infiltrate a tiny town in the Texas Panhandle and find a tract of land his employer can turn into an industrial hog farm. Bob tells the locals he's scouting for luxury home developers ("They feel there is potential here"), but as a cover story it's less than clever. Only a fool would build mansions in the godforsaken Panhandle country, a place of light soil, bad wind, killing drought, and end-of-world thunder. "To live here," one Panhandler tells Bob, "it sure helps if you are half cow and half mesquite and all crazy." The narrative follows Bob's hapless quest to ink a deal, but Proulx's mission is bigger than that. She's out to tell the story of the Panhandle itself, to write an entirely new literary territory into existence. With the help of a menagerie of eccentric characters set down in "the most complicated part of North America," Proulx succeeds admirably. --Claire Dederer
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