Proulx's Gruesome Wyoming

Tragedy is inescapabble in Annie Proulx's unforgiving environments: the simple concurrences of wind and rain, cold and distance, render experiences unthinkably abhorrent and the crushingly sad not only possible but inevitable. She locates her stories, like her novels, in places where the difficulty of survival makes people poor and hard: Close Range: Wyoming Stories, Proulx's first collection of short stories in more than ten years, echoes 1988's collection Heartsongs in its unwavering gaze at human tragedy in nature's liminal spaces, where no quarter is asked and none given by protagonist, nature or narrator. It is this equanimity of Proulx which, together with her remarkable and idiosyncratic eye for texture, makes her stories so compelling. Throwing harsh light, she does not appear to cede sympathy; but it is true that there exists, in her strongest work, a kind of vast and vague mourning call, a deep, sighing identification.

Proulx once lived in Vermont and Newfoundland, and the works which made her famous--Heartsongs, Postcards and The Shipping News--are more than simply rooted in those places: it is Proulx's firm belief, a belief that sometimes seems to verge on determinism, that geography inexorably shapes human behavior. She now lives in Wyoming, and Close Range is a collection which grows out of what Proulx understands as the essential spirit of Wyoming: almost no story in this collection goes by without murder or sudden violence, without rape or incest or (nearly always) adultery, without man or woman being broken by the isolation and the struggle of survival. The most deeply troubling and perhaps the best of the stories in the new collection, "People in Hell Just Want a Drink of Water," tells of the way a family of cowboy brothers viciously castrate a severely crippled man: Proulx comments, "Only earth and sky matter. Only the endlessly repeated flood of morning light. You begin to see that God does not owe us much beyond that." The reader should be grateful that Proulx does not often drop into this kind of openly reflective tone: she is at her best when carefully texturing rural life, when she tells her stories without wavering or flinching, without intruding into lives so deeply touching and so very distant and unchangeable they seem like fate.

It is important not to classify Proulx among the trendy and in general second-rate group of writers who are identified as "nature writers." Unmistakably, these stories are about people: indeed, it is that for stories which rely so heavily on the impact of environment on behavior, the Close Range stories spend such a small amount of time in actual description of the physical environment. Proulx' concern is the human consequences of the environment, which creeps into the stories and suffuses them with significance but never suffocates them. And in stories that address a limited geographical area and a limited range of settings, and which draw from the same source of tragedy, it is one of the strongest tributes to Proulx' craft that the human characters, and their various tragedies, remain discrete and distinct. Perhaps there is one common tension, the big sky pushing down with an almost unbearable weight, but each of the protagonists stands or falls alone.

In Close Range's weakest stories, "Job History," "55 Miles to the Gas Pump" and "A Lonely Coast," the litaneous recurrence of tragedy does become uninteresting: one begins, at times, to wish for a hint of lives that are not being slowly ground down. But these are remarkably few weak points in a collection of 11 stories: and in stories like "The Half-Skinned Steer," "The Mud Below," and, most strikingly, "Brokeback Mountain," Proulx reasserts herself with a force that has grown and become refined since the fine Heartsongs collection. She has developed herself as a chronicler of memory, and her protagonists in these stories are more psychologically compelling than even the strongest characters in Heartsongs. The past bleeds silently and met seamlessly into the present, or snaps back like a whip, and what tragic consequences may come from present actions seem to grow organically and necessarily from the past: a man freezes to death, defeated by a curse and by the unforgiving wind; a boy gives his life to the empty and futile myth of the western bullrider, the memory of his abandoning father inescapable. Like the bareboned land from which they grew, the Close Range stories open themselves up entirely to the reader, exposing naked nerve. In becoming one of our finest short story writers, Proulx has learned to strip away the enigma that shields personality, to expose memory and personality, somehow in her search for the authentically tragic to remain as dispassionately powerful, and as intimate, as nature.