A Writer’s Perspective: Review of Annie Proulx’s Close Range: Wyoming Stories
by
Brendan West-Moreland
Some writers evoke the concept of place more than others. Stephen King has laid claim to the entire state of Maine; Faulkner chose a “postage stamp of soil” in Mississippi (it’s pronounced YOK-nah-puh-TAW-fah, for those who live in fear of being asked). Others are more cosmopolitan. Annie Proulx’s most famous work is, perhaps, The Shipping News, and many fans of that novel might believe that Proulx spends most of her time in Newfoundland. According to the jacket on her wonderful collection entitled Close Range, though, her true home is Wyoming. She proves herself a true daughter of that rough, beautiful country.
Proulx’s prose is equally rough and beautiful. The book opens with “The Half-Skinned Steer,” a folktale of sorts about resisting change. The story’s final images will make you think twice about traveling alone in unfamiliar country. Even better is “The Mud Below,” a long tale about a rodeo cowboy and his decidedly unromantic lifestyle. Proulx breathes tragic life into these everyday characters. Consider this passage from “Mud,” in which Diamond, our protagonist, recovers from a particularly rough bullride.
Diamond saw himself in the spotted mirror, two black eyes, bloody nostrils, his abraded right cheek, his hair dark with sweat, bull hairs stuck to his dirty, tear-streaked face, a bruise from armpit to buttocks. He was dizzy with the pain and a huge weariness overtook him. The euphoric charge had never kicked in this time. If he were dead this might be hell—smoking doctors and rank bulls, eight hundred miles of night road ahead, hurting all the way.
So . . . who wants to be a bullrider now?
The much shorter “Job History” needs only a few pages to summarize the history of a family’s economic collapse, while the dry humor of “The Blood Bay,” another folktale, nearly makes up for the McCarthyian darkness of “People in Hell Just Want a Drink of Water” or the Eugene O’Neill family that has somehow been transplanted into “The Bunchgrass Edge of the World.” The title objects in “Pair a Spurs” just might be cursed, and the personal devastation visited on the characters seems almost inevitable.
And, of course, by now no one needs me to point out the themes and tones of “Brokeback Mountain.” The story is much sparer than the film; we know little about Jack Twist, less about the secondary characters. But Proulx’s narration provides stronger insight into the character she seems most interested in, Ennis Del Mar. If you’ve seen the film, you know the lines and the images—the two men’s shirts locked in the sort of long-lasting embrace that Jack and Ennis were mostly denied in their lives; Ennis’s final “Jack, I swear—,” perhaps even more tragic here because of how Proulx finishes the paragraph; the frustration and longing in the simple declaration “I wish I knew how to quit you.” “Brokeback” (and Brokeback) has spawned far too many parodies already; one wonders why we as a culture need to poke fun at the pain we ourselves cause. But there’s nothing funny about Proulx’s story, and we are all better because she wrote these characters into existence.
All of this might imply that the book is a total downer, but that would hardly be accurate. Though none of the tales really qualifies as pure comedy, much of Proulx’s down-home dialogue is intentionally funny, as are many of the situations. If you can see the humor in a story such as William Faulkner’s “Was,” you’ll get some laughs in Close Range.
The prose is often as icy and blasted as the Wyoming winter landscapes across which her characters walk, but this too is a compliment. Proulx’s tales drop you in the middle of snow-covered open ranges, in slushy dirt-caked streets, in smoky bars that smell like beer and cowshit. Open her collection and breathe deeply, immersing yourself in the scent of a mid-American frontier.
A