This is the fourth in my series of five reviews of short fiction collections. Close Range is Annie Proulx’s first collection of Wyoming Stories — spare tales of lives lived and lost in a harsh and lonely land.
One of the themes of these reviews is what I believe to be the very art of short fiction: choosing the few words that say the most. More than any other writer today, Proulx does this. She is a master of dialect and cadence, shading in a character’s background, subculture, secrets and losses with just a sentence of dialogue.
Proulx has released three collections of Wyoming Stories, but this is the best-known, largely because it includes the short story Brokeback Mountain. I have been a fan of Proulx’s since long before the film version of this lonely tale was released, but I hadn’t yet delved into her short fiction when I saw the film. Proulx may have won a Pulitzer for The Shipping News, but to my mind, her talent shines most in the short story form. And of all her short fiction, Close Range is the collection I love best.
The 11 stories in Close Range span the whole of the 20th Century and into the noughties, modern cowboys losing an old battle, laptops and cellular phones as impotent against the Wyoming weather as the horses and lean-tos that preceded them. The theme that runs through these stories is not futility, but hardness: rugged people living life uphill in a vast and godless land.
“You ever see a house burning up in the night, way to hell and gone out there on the plains? Nothing but blackness and your headlights cutting a little wedge into it, could be the middle of the ocean for all you can see. And in that big dark a crown of flame the size of your thumbnail trembles. You’ll drive for an hour seeing it until it burns out or you do, until you pull off the road to close your eyes or look up at sky punched with bullet holes. And you might think about the people in the burning house, see them trying for the stairs, but mostly you don’t give a damn. They are too far away, like everything else.”
So opens A Lonely Coast, an observation of the last act of Josanna Skiles. Underemployed with powder on her nose, pouring herself into too-tight clothing to wriggle on a sticky dance floor, weatherbeaten lure for any cowboy who’ll take her, Josanna’s story isn’t specifically Wyoming or even American. Women paint themselves into corners all over the world, and their end is as universal as the blind desperation that fuels them. Says the narrator, “I think Josanna seen her chance and taken it. Friend, it’s easier than you think to yield up to the dark impulse.”
Every so often, Proulx counterbalances the weight of inevitability, which seems to serve as a lodestone for most of her stories, with a touch of magic realism.
In The Bunchgrass Edge of the World, Ottaline Touhey, fat, lonely and pretty much resigned to growing old and asexual on the family ranch, hears an empathetic voice coming from a disused John Deere tractor. The tractor becomes a friend, a lifeline and eventually, the catalyst for Ottaline’s salvation.
Pair a Spurs is another story with an unlikely spin, where a pair of silver comet spurs bewitches ornery rancher Car Scropes, drawing him to whichever woman wears them, and finally, to his own kind of madness.
The stories that stayed with me most, and the two I reach for every time I take Close Range off the shelf, are People in Hell Just Want a Drink of Water and Brokeback Mountain. The former is striking for its cast of characters and snatches of dialogue; the latter for the impossibility and loss that spread through it like a stain.
People in Hell Just Want a Drink of Water tells of a slow-burning and eventually fatal friction between the Tinsley and Dunmire families. Jaxon Dunmire, the eldest of seven work-raised boys, now a ranch-hardened man, is the old Wyoming, while the soft Tinsley clan, more crippled by its tolerance of mental illness than the illness itself, represents the new. Though some things change, some things don’t. Weakness doesn’t last in this place.
Brokeback Mountain is the final piece in the collection, and fittingly so: it stayed with me long after the others had gone. A story of loneliness and regret, of love only identified as such long after it was lost, there is a universality to these characters and their flaws that goes far beyond gay cowboys.
Ennis del Mar and Jack Twist, “pair a deuces going nowhere”, are co-workers then companions then something else entirely one isolated summer on Brokeback Mountain. Theirs is an irresistible connection, but impossible to make last — an ache we have all felt.
“Later, that dozy embrace solidified in his memory as the single moment of artless, charmed happiness in their separate and difficult lives. Nothing marred it, even the knowledge that Ennis would not then embrace him face to face because he did not want to see nor feel that it was Jack he held. And maybe, he thought, they’d never got much farther than that. Let be, let be.”
Proulx writes the way feelings feel, a punch in the stomach or a bird in the chest. Her storytelling tugs at my insides and makes me yearn for a rural life: hay bales, home preserves, lonely roads and black nights alive with wind, crickets and stars.
It’s a life I have never owned (and realistically, probably would not suit) but the country time I have borrowed on family visits to ranchland Alberta, city-kid cousin tripping around the farm after her cowboy-hatted uncle, has left its mark. Proulx’s names and places and her characters’s day to day lives resonate with a familiarity I find hard to describe. As much as they are not, these stories feel like home.
No related posts.