American Dream, American Nightmare : POSTCARDS, <i> by E. Annie Proulx,</i> Charles Scribner’s Sons, $22.95, 352 pages

It’s no particular news by now that democracy, a free market economy and social Darwinism are all names that seem to cover the same set of circumstances.

It’s no particular news that while “freedom” in a national context means freedom to marry and divorce Ivana Trump, it also covers the freedom to stand for hours in the snow for a chance at an entry-level job.

If we are a nation of success stories, we are also a nation of walking wounded; of grand old families who have never made it, never will.

E. Annie Proulx picks as her family the Bloods, who, almost since there was an America, have been scratching out a living from inhospitable New England soil.

Mink, the father, is prone to chronic murderous rages. He has lived a life of unspeakable hardship and has nothing to show for it but some uncooperative milk-cows, a wife who stays out of his way, a daughter who dislikes him, and two sons, Dub and Loyal, both of whom would give grief to any parent.

Dub is a one-armed ne’er-do-well who loves to drink and dance and truly hates to work. Loyal works very hard, but he has a little sexual problem that only the reader is privy to: He is a rapist-killer. Loyal is not quite sure how it happened, but as the novel opens he’s crouched above his girlfriend, who is just about as dead as they come.

Loyal buries his fiancee under a crumbling stone wall, goes home and announces that the two of them have decided to leave the farm. The kind of family the Bloods are is beautifully delineated in this scene. Loyal’s father is so enraged by this defection from the family hell pit that he locks all the doors, boards up all the windows, but Loyal escapes anyway, and for the rest of his life he will send postcards back to this American Black Hole of loss and despair that--for better or worse--he must call “home.”

Loyal Blood becomes both an American hero and an American casualty. Naive and on the loose, he gets robbed, lives through a mine disaster, works around enough uranium to ensure his early death and buys a bean farm (which naturally is destroyed by prairie fire). On the bright side, Loyal collects fossils in the wild West, helps an astronomer build an observatory, tracks elk in the Northern wilderness.

But Loyal’s natural trajectory is from bad to worse. Bad food, bad drink, bad luck, a terrible fear that he might rape and kill again, doom this poor man to a nightmare spiral of failure. By the time he’s 50, Loyal Blood is old, beaten, toothless. Strangers laugh at him behind his back.

But Loyal was the best of the lot. Mink also comes to a very bad end. His wife scavenges a few good years but ends up alone in a trailer park and dies a typical Blood death. Dub’s success is laced with irony. And the daughter, Mernell--who has met her husband through a classified ad--is infertile. The family is dying, finally dead.

The futile postcards keep rolling, some of them landing in dead letter offices, some addressed to people already dead, some never mailed at all. The sadness, the downside of America, is beautifully portrayed here.

The author’s literary ancestors range from Edith Wharton’s “Ethan Frome” to Nathanael West’s “A Cool Million.” But, Proulx sees the grand side too. There’s a scene, where Loyal Blood and another fossil prospector--one of them with a splinter just taken out of his eyeball, the other with a few fingers just sawed off--feast on steak and crab meat and pour down continuous slugs of good booze and plan their next marvelous self-destructive adventure, that sings like a tuning fork.

The author recognizes the primal American urge to get out of the house ! Steinbeck saw it, and Kerouac and A. B. Guthrie. Forget profit and loss and three-bedroom homes and the prissier parts of the American dream. Go for the raw experience, even if it means you lose everything you (thought you) had. E. Annie Proulx sees every part of this national configuration and wraps every character here in a crazy-quilt of literary affection.

Next: Bettyanne Kevles reviews “The Mind’s Sky: Human Intelligence in a Cosmic Context” by Timothy Ferris (Bantam).