That Old Ace in the Hole, By E. Annie Proulx

Famous for her Pulitzer-winning novel The Shipping News, Proulx’s carved out a literary niche chronicling the lives of down-and-out communities all across North America—Newfoundland in Shipping, New England in Postcards, and now the Texas Panhandle in Ace. The story is something like the film Local Hero as it might have been told by Flannery O’Connor or T.C. Boyle. (Kirkus Reviews called it a kind of Rake’s Progress, which is too bad because we’d really like to have been the ones to make that reference.) Bob Dollar, a young and ambitious employee of a multinational hog farming corporation called Global Pork Rind, is sent to Texas to find a suitable spot for a new plant, and then buy the nearby land on the cheap. He finds his target in the little town of Woolybucket, but finds strong resistance, and begins to have serious doubts when he learns about the drastic effect giant hog farms have on the land around them. Proulx’s affinity for oddball character names is in full force, and adds to the sense of comic grotesquery: among others, we meet Ribeye Cluke, Jerky Baum, Habakuk van Melkebeek, LaVon Fronk, and the title character, a crusty old windmill repairman named Ace Couch.