A game of musical shares

In E Annie Proulx's outlandishly original and unforgettable The Shipping News, the chapters were punctuated by diagrams of knots. These lent a brisk, masculine, outdoor-ishness to prose which was rich and chewy with epithets. Postcards, similarly, had "real" postcards handwritten in the text: messy, funny, nerdish, occasionally indecipherable - much like life, in fact.

Her latest, Accordion Crimes, has sober little engravings of old-style accordions nestling between the chapters. Design quirk or affectation? Whichever, it's also a reminder - if one were needed - that with Proulx you might get anything. You have to

put your expectations on hold, bob along with her singular and eccentric current.

This is a lavish, extraordinary, perplexing tidal wave of a novel, an overwhelming cross-section of American immigrant life. It takes in roughly a century of historical and social change, a tangle of different races (and flecks of their language) yet it will swoop in and dwell on a "plastic barrette in the shape of a seahorse" in a woman's hair.

A Sicilian accordion-maker arrives in New York in the last century with a small, green, two-row button accordion and a son. He loses both and dies. Years pass, and the accordion moves in and out of pawnshops, in and out of families, in and out of the hands of those who can and cannot play it. It survives almost everyone in the novel. It is left in a taxi by one man on whose life we have eavesdropped for, say, 50 pages, and is then found (50 pages later) by another, whose life we now follow for another 50. And so on.

The last glimpse of our battered green protagonist, on the book's final page, is almost unbearably moving - not because of anything you feel for the instrument itself, but because you finally understand what Proulx is telling you. Her book is a fat,

angry thesaurus of life and death and loss. It catalogues people who come together for a few significant, intense moments. Individuals who fight, laugh, sleep and work together, whose lives intersect, overlap and then veer away, the link severed by death, choice or random accident. Deep in the book, someone calls it "the old, evil thing, brothers and sisters losing each other ... families torn up like scrap paper, the home place left and lost forever".

Proulx's narrative zips along, busy and apparently dispassionate. Events are delivered in hard little bullets, like unrelated news items. Characters are born, grow up, love or get betrayed, then die or lose themselves, abandoned suddenly, others taken up. People get what they want or they don't. Or else they get what they thought they wanted and find it's not enough. Some kill themselves. Lives are summed up in bitterly ironic little postscripts as people are struck down by cancer or flying metal, are bitten by poisonous spiders or fall into hot pools. Not to mention the alluring flash-forward parentheses that last a whole page. But ultimately, the narrative voice is a sort of God. All is known, discovered, finished.

As a poem, Accordion Crimes truly verges on genius - the work of a writer who has the scent and texture of the language absolutely in her grasp. Her words are made moist and bright as paint, smelly as breath or weather or food. Rowdy and punchy and never coy, she appears to work linguistic miracles. Hair is curly "sucked dandelion stems"; a woman keeps a "bitterly clean house". A person is "blond with white lips and transparent eyes", a man blows smoke from both nostrils "like a bull on a cold

plateau". An especially unattractive old woman has "furrowed and liver-spotted skin like a slip-cover on a rump-sprung sofa", cups are the "white of peeled eggs".

But as a novel Accordion Crimes is not particularly enjoyable. Such startling brilliance of description yields an oddly chilly, monotone effect. It's as if these lives are always seen from too far away. There are hundreds of pages of incident, but no single plot. Terrible things happen - extraordinary adventures, appalling deaths - but there is barely any suspense. There are literally scores of characters, a smouldering mass of physical detail, but no psychological depth or even narrative allegiance. The relentless energy of Proulx's voice somehow pushes you away. She gives you all this, and then doesn't allow you to care. It feels devastating, from so controlled a writer, this little betrayal. You want to pummel with your fists and shout "Let me in!"

So Proulx, for all her distressing brilliance, is - for this reader at least - an unrewarding novelist. Could it be that she's more interested in the writing than the story? The effect is much like flicking through someone else's photo album: the lives are vividly there, the stories seem real, the anecdotes undoubtedly matter, but what are you supposed to do with them?