Proulx’s was 56 when she wrote Postcards, her first novel, and it won the Pen/Faulkner Award, making her the first woman to win this award. A graduate of UVM (PBK) and a 30 year resident of the Green Mountain State gave her the background for this searing and sad story of the Blood family of Cream Hill, Vermont, a fictitious community of hillside farms and deep poverty. The book uses a series of postcards to begin most chapters, setting the time and location as well as often indicating important plot events in the lives of Mink and Jewel Blood and their 3 children, Loyal, Dub, and Mernelle. The book begins with Loyal dragging his girlfriend’s body to a stone wall where he buries her. We learn nothing about Billy’s life or death—did he murder her? Did she die an accidental death of passion? but her death overshadows Loyal for the rest of his life and haunts the novel as well. The implicit message is that someone in rural VT can completely and unexplainably disappear and it makes no difference. Life is short, unhappy, and cheap. After Billy dies, Loyal leaves the farm and spends his life as a silent wanderer and loner, farming, mining, trapping, dinosaur bone hunting. Wherever he goes, however, he encounters tragic failure and loss. One armed Dub also leaves the farm after being jailed for arson for burning the barn for insurance money and finds wealth and a Cuban wife in Miami before tax evasion and civil disorder disrupt his life. Mernelle marries a good man who advertised in a newspaper for a wife and though childless, finds a good life before losing her husband to cancer at an early age. Mink hangs himself in prison. Jewel dies after driving her car onto a rock on a logging road in the snow while trying to reach Mt. Washington. Life is hard, futile, and joyless for the poor in rural Vermont in the post-WWII years when other places are booming and rural Vermont is full of victims of change. Proulx is relentless in proving this to the reader. Not an easy read at all. Another connection in this book is a postcard to Otter Blood (a cousin) from the Town of Cream Hill informing him of septic system problems had the newly required zip code on the card: 05030. Though addressed to Wallings, VT, that zip code actually indicates Ascutney, the town on the other side of the mountain from our house. Small world!