A review by esessa
That Old Ace in the Hole by Annie Proulx

4.0

In general I really enjoyed this... I love Annie Proulx's descriptive writing style and there were passages where that really shone through. But much as the main character, Bob Dollar, creates a cover story for himself to learn more about the Texas panhandle, his story itself often felt like nothing more than a frame for a random assortment of tales that Proulx must have uncovered while researching this book. It's like she found all these great, unrelated stories and needed a way to make them fill a novel, so she picked the first broad narrative device she thought up and hung all the little stories on that frame. So it did feel a bit transparent at times, particularly the longer digressions or remembrances that had nothing to do with the present. There were also a few just totally out-of-nowhere incidents that didn't seem likely or related at all to the rest of the plot. In retrospect, most of them had to do with moments when she tried to reveal some aspect of Bob's character - I felt he was really underdeveloped, and I was so disconnected from him, since his only purpose seemed to be as a frame narrative, that when she actually tried to write something deep or meaningful about him I just couldn't get into it. Having said all that, she did beautifully illustrate the lives and places in the Texas panhandle, and the personalities of everyone except Bob Dollar were vivid and relatable. This also wasn't as depressing overall as some of Proulx's work can be, which I appreciated.