Rating: 
Summary: A litany of sorrows
Review: While "Postcards" is as beautifully written and original as "The Shipping News," it's a depressing read. Instead of the passionate, moving sadness of tragedy, the story is a slow, steady grinding of one catastrophe after another."Postcards" presents the reader with an endless string of murder, sickness, injury, theft, suicide...By the end of the book I was hardly moved by any of it. A few moments of hope and human kindness would have made the losses seem more profound. Without it, the violence and pain ended up seeming merely pointless. The book has its redeeming qualities from a technical standpoint. Proulx manages to carry off the postcards concept (each chapter starts with a reproduction of a postcard message that adds some information to the story) without it becoming gimmicky. The story is interesting in the way that watching a car crash might be interesting - you wonder what else could possibly happen to these people. And her writing style and subjects are as quirky and finely drawn as ever. But ultimately I found I couldn't care about the characters' lows when there were no highs to measure them against, and instead of a plot the book was simply a litany of sorrows.
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