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

From Publishers Weekly
Proulx's people are the hardworking poor who live in bleak, derelict, noisome corners of America where they endure substandard housing, eat bad food and know everybody else's business, going back generations. Most are voluble, in vernacular that sings with regional dialects. All have names that Proulx evidently savors, monikers like LaVon Grace Fronk, Jerky Baum, Habakuk van Melkebeek and Freda Beautyrooms-with personalities to match. The protagonist of her latest novel is the relatively average Bob Dollar (aka Mr. Dime and Mr. Penny), a young man determined to make something of himself, whose boss at the Global Pork Rind corporation, Ribeye Cluke, sends him from Denver to the Texas and Oklahoma panhandle, where he will secretly scout for properties that can be bought for hog farms. As he settles in the town of Wooleybucket, Bob is exposed to the stench that hog farms emit: "a heavy ammoniac stink that burned the eyes and the throat." He also comes to understand the old folks' love of their land, which they've worked through drought, floods, tornadoes and ice storms. Pulitzer Prize-winner Proulx imparts this information with such minute accuracy that it's like seeing a painting up close and magnified, with each tiny brush stroke lovingly emphasized. One grows quite fond of the characters so beset by nature, fate and bizarre accidents, especially old Ace Crouch, a lifelong repairer of windmills, who represents the joke that the title promises. But the novel, which loops ahead and back again in a series of lusty anecdotes, doesn't engage the emotions with the same immediacy as did Postcards and The Shipping News. Readers must settle here for a good story steeped in atmosphere, but not a compelling one.Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Pulitzer Prize winner Proulx crafts the story of a young man who takes a job buying up cattle ranchland in the Texas panhandle that could be used for hog farms. Alas, the crusty old ranchers he encounters aren't so interesting in selling. Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From AudioFile
Arliss Howard serves up a brilliant performance of Proulx's new novel about the sad, floundering, but earnest-to-a-fault Bob Dollar. Landing his first real job, Dollar sets off on an unlikely hero's journey, quietly scouting the Texas Panhandle for land that his employer, Global Pork Rind, plans to use for corporate hog farming. In a pitch-perfect reading, Howard narrates Dollar's encounters with landscape, history, and a slew of eccentric characters, each of whom is brought richly to life as Howard shifts seamlessly from one distinctive voice to another. The region itself is an engaging character, and Proulx's inventiveness with language is delicious. The story, although admittedly polemical, is entertaining, absorbing, and ultimately satisfying. As read by Howard, it is all that and more. E.S. © AudioFile 2003, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

From Booklist
For Proulx, place, whether it's Newfoundland in The ShippingNews (1993) or Wyoming in Close Range (1999), or, in her newestnovel, the dusty, tornado-brewing panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma, ismore than landscape: it's a covenant between one particular stretch ofblessed earth and the families who make their living upon it. Buttraditional ways of life such as family farming are nearly extinct,and Proulx, like Barbara Kingsolver, Rick Bass, and Barry Lopez, seeksto examine and dramatize the repercussions of this loss. Her unwittingwitness to change is 25-year-old Bob Dollar, whose parents disappearedwhen he was 8 after leaving him on the doorstep of his loving uncleTambourine's Denver resale shop, Used but Not Abused. Bob loves toread but has only the vaguest of ambitions, and therefore ends upbecoming a "hog scout" for Global Pork Rind, a corporation that buysup land for gargantuan, enclosed hog facilities. Unaware of thebrutality and environmental havoc wrought by these abominations, heblindly accepts orders to lie about the purpose of his sojourn inWoolybucket, Texas. But Bob is quite taken with panhandle life and thecolorful tales told by his loquacious landlady and self-appointed townhistorian LaVon Fronk (who keeps tarantulas for pets), and ultimatelyfails miserably at convincing landowners to sell theirproperty. Proulx's laudable outrage over environmental abusesovershadows literary nuance, yet, as always, she revels in odd twistsof fate and characters as quirky as their names, and greatly sharpensour insights into western history and ecological realities whilerhapsodizing splendidly over everything from Bakelite jewelry toquilts to windmills. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
The Boston Globe [In] That Old Ace in the Hole, Proulx's hardscrabble wit and wisdom are heightened by the force of her language -- her bone-deep feel for its curves and crevices.

Book Description
In That Old Ace in the Hole, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner Annie Proulx has written an exhilarating story brimming with language, history, landscape, music, and love. The novel, Proulx's fourth, is told through the eyes of Bob Dollar, a young Denver man trying to make good in a bad world. Dollar is out of college but aimless, and he takes a job with Global Pork Rind -- his task to locate big spreads of land in the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles that can be purchased by the corporation and converted to hog farms. Dollar finds himself in a Texas town called Woolybucket, whose idiosyncratic inhabitants have ridden out all manner of seismic shifts in panhandle country. Dollar settles into LaVon Fronk's old bunkhouse for fifty dollars a month, helps out at Cy Frease's Old Dog Café, targets Ace and Tater Crouch's ranch for Global Pork, and learns the hard way how vigorously the old owners will hold on to their land, even though their children want no part of it. Robust, often bawdy, strikingly original and intimate, That Old Ace in the Hole tracks the vast waves of change that have shaped the American landscape and character over the past century -- and in Bob Dollar, Proulx has created one of the most irresistible characters in contemporary fiction.

About the Author
Annie Proulx's The Shipping News won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the National Book Award for Fiction, and the Irish Times International Fiction Prize. She is the author of two other novels: Postcards, winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award, and Accordion Crimes. She has also written two collections of short stories, Heart Songs and Other Stories and Close Range.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

In That Old Ace in the Hole, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner Annie Proulx has written an exhilarating story brimming with language, history, landscape, music, and love. The novel, Proulx's fourth, is told through the eyes of Bob Dollar, a young Denver man trying to make good in a bad world. Dollar is out of college but aimless, and he takes a job with Global Pork Rind -- his task to locate big spreads of land in the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles that can be purchased by the corporation and converted to hog farms. Dollar finds himself in a Texas town called Woolybucket, whose idiosyncratic inhabitants have ridden out all manner of seismic shifts in panhandle country. These are tough men and women who survived tornadoes and dust storms, and witnessed firsthand the demise of the great cattle ranches. Now it's feed lots, hog farms, and ever-expanding drylands. Dollar settles into LaVon Fronk's old bunkhouse for fifty dollars a month, helps out at Cy Frease's Old Dog Cafe, targets Ace and Tater Crouch's ranch for Global Pork, and learns the hard way how vigorously the old owners will hold on to their land, even though their children want no part of it. Robust, often bawdy, strikingly original and intimate, That Old Ace in the Hole tracks the vast waves of change that have shaped the American landscape and character over the past century -- and in Bob Dollar, Proulx has created one of the most irresistible characters in contemporary fiction.

FROM THE CRITICS

Book Magazine - Sven Birkerts

Idiosyncratic, defiantly unfashionable, Annie Proulx is unlike any novelist writing today, and it may take a while for the reader to get into the strange, slow drift of her various worlds. For one thing, she does not orchestrate her plots around powerful conflicts, and she cares little for psychologizing. In Proulx's hands, the novel is more like a textile, something made gradually vast by the accumulation of small stitches. The vision is panoramic and atmospheric, rooted so deeply in locale that locale becomes a character itself. This was certainly true of her National Book Award￯﾿ﾽwinning The Shipping News (1993), where rough, tussocky Newfoundland vied with the strange, shambling figure of Quoyle, the book's protagonist, for top billing, and it's even more the case with her newest, That Old Ace in the Hole. The folksy roll of the title is accurately suggestive. This is a rural tale, an almost Chaucerian conglomeration of hard-life accounts and facts twisted into legend, all of them rooted in the unforgiving flatlands of the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles. Proulx's arrestingly unremarkable protagonist, Bob Dollar, "a young, curly-headed man of twenty-five with the broad face of a cat," arrives in Woolybucket, Texas, ostensibly on assignment from Global Pork Rind, a hog-farming conglomerate looking to develop new farm sites. In fact, though he does not realize it, Bob is seeking the one thing he's never had: a home. Abandoned in childhood by his feckless parents, reared by an eccentric uncle in Denver, Bob is passive and pliable, blandly likable, awaiting formation in every sense. If he is not promising as a character—and indeed, he remains essentially a man of surfaces throughout—he is the perfect medium for the projections of all who surround him. He is what Saul Bellow called a "contrast gainer," one who makes those around him shine. And what a gallery of eccentrics he finds in this backcountry, not least among them La Von Fronk, his pepper-tongued landlady, who keeps enormous tarantulas for pets and fills Bob's head with stories, true and apocryphal, from her tireless research for a book of local history she hopes someday to write. But La Von is hardly unique. "In his first weeks in Woolybucket," writes Proulx, "Bob Dollar discovered that if the terrain was level and flat, the characters of the people were not, for eccentricities were valued and cultivated, as long as they were not too peculiar. Crusty old ranchers who worked an embroidery hoop, or a pair of septuagenarian twin sisters, or ... Mrs. Splawn who inherited her husband's Dee-Tex metal detector and could be seen on road verges seeking coins and engagement rings thrown away by spiteful and hot-headed Texas girls, were not only tolerated but admired." Informed of the local resistance to the large-scale farming of hogs (the terrible smell is the obvious issue), Bob poses as a scout for luxury real estate developers. It is the novel's one subterfuge, but the attendant scrapes and confusions create little in the way of suspense. Nor is Bob himself a compelling enough individual to make up the narrative deficit. But then, this is not what the author is after. Proulx is a stylist, a phrasemaker besotted by place, and our immersion depends entirely on the sentence-by-sentence evocation of regional peculiarities. That she succeeds, keeping the pages going by like mile markers along some barren Southwestern highway, is testament to her poetic gifts. Here is a world not glanced at but seen, a landscape known through all the senses. "In the dulling light," Proulx writes, "he noticed a low rise to the south, too low to be called a hill even in this flat country, little more than a swelling as though the earth had inhaled and held the breath." Vivid character descriptions and flashes of the passing daily show abound in this book, and one can find moments to showcase on every page. Testing this assertion, I open quite at random to a scene of a cockfight where Bob observes one Stick Flores, "a tall man with close-cropped hair and a long, creased beeswax face, his lips the color of genitals, broad yellow hands with curved nails, climbing into the announcer's cage." But That Old Ace in the Hole is not all episodic portraiture. Under the surface, building slowly, there is a powerful current of resistance. The stubborn crotchetiness of character we encounter is something more than just the fruit of harsh and isolated lives. It is also a glorying in the idea of individuality, and as such it implicitly counters the assumptions of corporate mentality. Bob Dollar's money is finally no good in this place and may never be. Significantly, he grasps this simple truth at about the same time that he finally experiences an intimate connection to Woolybucket. Annie Proulx is a master of the art of subtle accretion. The moments of her novel, the mostly unremarkable encounters of her characters, silt up to a thickness that starts to feel very much like the world itself. The prose may be slow and demand care from the reader, but Proulx repays our attention with a thousand shocks of charged recognition.

Publishers Weekly

Proulx's people are the hardworking poor who live in bleak, derelict, noisome corners of America where they endure substandard housing, eat bad food and know everybody else's business, going back generations. Most are voluble, in vernacular that sings with regional dialects. All have names that Proulx evidently savors, monikers like LaVon Grace Fronk, Jerky Baum, Habakuk van Melkebeek and Freda Beautyrooms-with personalities to match. The protagonist of her latest novel is the relatively average Bob Dollar (aka Mr. Dime and Mr. Penny), a young man determined to make something of himself, whose boss at the Global Pork Rind corporation, Ribeye Cluke, sends him from Denver to the Texas and Oklahoma panhandle, where he will secretly scout for properties that can be bought for hog farms. As he settles in the town of Wooleybucket, Bob is exposed to the stench that hog farms emit: "a heavy ammoniac stink that burned the eyes and the throat." He also comes to understand the old folks' love of their land, which they've worked through drought, floods, tornadoes and ice storms. Pulitzer Prize-winner Proulx imparts this information with such minute accuracy that it's like seeing a painting up close and magnified, with each tiny brush stroke lovingly emphasized. One grows quite fond of the characters so beset by nature, fate and bizarre accidents, especially old Ace Crouch, a lifelong repairer of windmills, who represents the joke that the title promises. But the novel, which loops ahead and back again in a series of lusty anecdotes, doesn't engage the emotions with the same immediacy as did Postcards and The Shipping News. Readers must settle here for a good story steeped in atmosphere, but not a compelling one. (One-day laydown Dec. 12) Forecast: Nobody captures Americana like Proulx, and the lure of her idiosyncratic characters should spark sales. Her strong stand against rapacious land corporations will attract readers who admire her outspoken opinions. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Pulitzer Prize winner Proulx crafts the story of a young man who takes a job buying up cattle ranchland in the Texas panhandle that could be used for hog farms. Alas, the crusty old ranchers he encounters aren't so interesting in selling. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

AudioFile

Arliss Howard serves up a brilliant performance of Proulx's new novel about the sad, floundering, but earnest-to-a-fault Bob Dollar. Landing his first real job, Dollar sets off on an unlikely hero's journey, quietly scouting the Texas Panhandle for land that his employer, Global Pork Rind, plans to use for corporate hog farming. In a pitch-perfect reading, Howard narrates Dollar's encounters with landscape, history, and a slew of eccentric characters, each of whom is brought richly to life as Howard shifts seamlessly from one distinctive voice to another. The region itself is an engaging character, and Proulx's inventiveness with language is delicious. The story, although admittedly polemical, is entertaining, absorbing, and ultimately satisfying. As read by Howard, it is all that and more. E.S. © AudioFile 2003, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews