Postcards

Postcards is a novel by the American writer Annie Proulx, published in 1992. It was her first novel, and it came before The Shipping News, for which she became much better known.

Loyal Blood is the young man at the centre of it. The accident that sends him away from the farm is described in the first pages of the book, and the secret of it is what he carries with him for the rest of his life as he prospects for uranium, traps coyotes and digs for dinosaur bones in one part of the country after another.

The postcards are the only messages that pass between him and his family, and because he never leaves a return address he never hears anything back. As a result he misses all the news from home, which includes the deaths of his parents, the sale of the family farm and his sister's marriage to a man she hardly knows.

The novel cuts between Loyal's travels and the story of the family in Vermont, and it is an account of a family being slowly pulled apart by changes it did not choose. Proulx wrote most of it in residence at a foundation in northern Wyoming, and she moved to the state a few years afterwards.