SOURCE: Carr, Helen. “In the Key of Life.” New Statesman 125, no. 4306 (18 October 1996): 48.

In the following review, Carr commends the detail and humor in Proulx's stories in Accordion Crimes.

As a novelist, E. Annie Proulx has had a remarkable, if so far brief career. When in 1991, at the age of 56, she published her first novel, Postcards, she became the first woman to win the PEN/Faulkner Prize. Her second, best-selling novel, The Shipping News, won the Pulitzer Prize, and now here is her third [Accordion Crimes], an extraordinary achievement that covers the length and breadth of the United States and its alternative history in the last 100 years. It is written from the point of view of “hyphenated” Americans—immigrants, blacks, Hispanics—for whom the American dream brought so often only wretchedness and pain.

Much of the finest recent US fiction has sprung from the country's ethnic diversity and ethnic...