Newsnight Review discussed the latest novel from E. Annie Proulx, the American writer whose The Shipping News won the Pulitzer Prize and became an international bestseller.

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(Edited highlights of the panel's review)

BONNIE GREER:
She succeeds in what she sets out to do, but the question is was what she sets out to do very interesting? She writes like an angel. You can put your hand anywhere in the book and you can find a paragraph that's beautiful. I have read almost all of her work. I have to say that I am a little bit tired of her sort of fixation with eccentricity at the expense of narrative. She tells stories, but the stories are basically in miniature as far as I am concerned. The whole is never as good as the parts. I think she is a miniaturist at the end of the day. This book is not as good, say, as The Shipping News. Her second book, I think is better than this. I didn't see the point of this, frankly. It was enjoyable, but big deal.

EKOW ESHUN:
It's Shipping News taken further, as Bonnie says. It's disappointing that it's not quite taken far enough. What she has done really is to succumb to the disease that affects best-selling American novelists. You can think of Patricia Cornwall or Tom Wharf. Basic novelists who sold an enormous amount and then get fixated with the idea that to do the next book, you have to do massive research. It's the equivalent of method acting. They live it. She has come out with hundreds of pages and reams of research, and she can't find a narrative to fit together around them. So what happens is the actual plot, the storyline, is almost cursory. The real star is the Texas panhandle, all the eccentric people. It would have been a better book if she had dispensed with the story of Bob Dollar through the middle, told the story of the people around it and done a non-narrative, non-fiction book. The stories are rich enough to tell.

LAWSON:
I got irritated at first because it was just eccentrics but then I wondered if it's slightly more subversive, because the current American President comes from Texas, and it can be read in the way that it's about the weirdness of Texas, little references to Enron and the rest of it.

MARK KERMODE:
I think it can be, but the problem is that it comes at you so densely, researched, and trying to prove its credentials, that you end up thinking - it read to me like a witness statement from someone who has been incredibly well tutored, and everything they are saying is factually correct but you don't believe any of it. In one moment, she notices in passing, completely correctly, that the people in this area, the sort of cinema they would have grown up with is not Gone with the Wind but the corpse grinders and blood feasts, as a horror fan I went that's fantastic she noticed that. A hundred pages later I was waiting for the story, what I ended up with the sense that, if there was a metaphor, a greater meaning to it, if there was a narrative, it got lost in the miniatures. It would maybe have worked better as a book of short stories or as a travelogue diary, or as an account of the area itself.