That Old Ace in the Hole - Softcover

Proulx, Annie

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0743242483 ISBN 13: 9780743242486

Publisher: Scribner Book Company, 2003

Synopsis

From Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner Annie Proulx comes 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.

About this title

Review:

The New York Observer Proulx is our laureate of landscape, the expansive descriptions of natural phenomena worthy of Barry Lopez or Edward Hoagland. [Her] fiction has become even richer book by book. With this funny and haunting panorama...she has managed to outdo her previous outdoing.

USA Today Annie Proulx's writing is charged with wit -- alive, funny, packed with brilliantly original images.

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.

From the Back Cover:

Some folks in the Texas panhandle do not like hog farms. But Bob Dollar, the newly-hired hog site scout for Global Pork Rind, intends to do his job. He is also determined not to turn out like his parents who left him on his Uncle Tam's doorstep as a child, and afflicted by the tendency to believe his own daydreams – to the point of forgetting that he made them up in the first place.

Bob ends up in Woolybucket, a town whose idiosyncratic inhabitants have ridden out all manner of booms and busts in panhandle country – cattle-ranching, tornadoes, dust storms, gas and oil days, feedlot proliferation. These tough men and women seem to grow stronger with age, seasoned by the rigours of their life, from ancient Freda Beautyrooms who controls a ranch Bob covets, to Ace Crouch, the windmiller who defies the hog farms. They aren't the only obstacles in Bob's path. As he settles in at La Von Fronk's bunkhouse and lends a hand at Cy Frease's Old Dog Café, Bob is forced to question everything,

With characteristic gusto and razor wit, Annie Proulx serves up a rich mix of history, landscape and quixotic Texan life in this novel about chasing dreams in a corporate world.

Praise for Annie Proulx

On 'Close Range:'
"A masterpiece"
'Daily Telegraph'

"Maybe the best writer in America"
'Independent on Sunday'

"Seismic...A brilliant writer at the height of her powers. Wickedly funny"
'Sunday Telegraph'

"Proulx's command of the raw idiom of rodeo-riders and cowhands is astonishing; it gives her the power to summon up entire lives within a few paragraphs"
'Esquire'

On 'The Shipping News:'
"To read 'The Shipping News' is to yearn to be sitting in The Flying Squid Lunchstop, eating Seal Fin Curry, watching the icebergs clink together in the bay"
'The Times'

"As stark and ruggedly beautiful as the storm-battered coast of Newfoundland itself"
'Sunday Telegraph'

About this edition

• Publisher: Scribner Book Company
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0743242483
• ISBN 13: 9780743242486
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 384