Even cowgirls get the blues

Close Range
By Annie Proulx
Scribner Paperback, 335 pages
Available at National Bookstore

Trust a fictionist to take you somewhere you never thought you’d be interested in going, then make it all seem as clear as day. That’s what Annie Proulx does in her writing, from her first novel, The Shipping News, to this collection of short stories, all set in the far-off world of Wyoming, USA. Close Range is an experiment of sorts for Proulx, who spent a year or two gathering up tall tales, legends and atmosphere from her native state. She spends her free time traveling America, but the stories in Close Range are very much settled in one place. Well, they’re settled and unsettled: most of her characters are cowboys, ranch owners and ranch hands, bull riders and cowpokes. They are people subject to fierce passions, fits of anger and bad luck, driven along like the winds of the Wyoming plains:

You stand there, braced. Cloud shadows race over the buff rock stacks as a projected film, casting a queasy, mottled ground rash. The air hisses and it is no local breeze but the great harsh sweep of wind from the turning of the earth.

Proulx has one of the most unique prose voices in modern literature. Her nervy, jangled patter in The Shipping News was part of what made her novel a Pulitzer Prize-winner. Here, we are given the voice of the Old West, full of grit, sand, pluck and poetry. Once you get past the chafed rhythms of Annie Proulx’s tumbleweed prose, you are in for a treat.

The voice is that of a spittoon, if you will, full of brass and ready for a lofty plug of tobacco to make it sing. In "The Half-Skinned Steer," we are taken along a long cross-country drive with Mero, an elderly rancher who left his Wyoming life years ago, only to be called back for the reading of his daddy’s will. The trip brings back memories of his father’s young girlfriend, who told tall tales over beer at night, entrancing the younger Mero so much that he had to escape to find his own wife, else be left with "his father’s leftovers." The great thing is how Proulx weaves in the story within a story, which she acknowledges was borrowed from an Icelandic folktale about a man so lazy, he only did his chores halfway (hence the title).

Several of the stories in Close Range have the whiff of tall tale, exaggeration, the sort of stuff ranchers might still talk about over campfires, to pass the time. If Proulx has found her inspiration from the Wyoming version of urban legends, more power to her. She brings out her themes of lonesomeness, broken dreams, and the foolishness of men in a country-tinged package that always entertains and frequently challenges. There’s even a tale of two cowboys in love (gasp!) through 30 years of broken marriages and cancelled dreams ("Brokeback Mountain").

Stylistically, Close Range’s stories often verge on the grotesque, recalling the bitter humor of another woman writer, Flannery O’Connor. But whereas O’Connor’s world was awash in Christian Baptist imagery, Proulx’s view is harsher, more physical and unflinching: like staring into the sunset.

All three women had been married, rough marriages full of fighting and black eyes and sobbing imprecations, all of them knew the trouble that came with drinking men and their hair-trigger tempers. Wyos are touchers, hot-blooded and quick, and physically yearning. Maybe it’s because they spend so much time handling livestock, but people here are always hand-shaking, patting, smoothing, caressing, enfolding. This instinct extends to anger, the lightning backhand slap, the hip-shot to throw you off balance, the elbow, a jerk and wrench, the swat, and then the serious stuff that’s meant to kill and sometimes does.

Humor surfaces in all of these stories, a humor that comes from an understanding of – and a necessary empathy with – human folly. Proulx never talks down to her characters, never gives them shorter shrift than they give themselves. Rather, she sizes them up, the way a place like Wyoming sizes them up.

"Reality’s never been much use out here," says a retired rancher quoted by Proulx at the start of the book. You can see what he means. In Wyoming’s windblown environment, those who think they’re slick find out the opposite pretty quick, and those who size up life too seriously get what’s coming to them. Proulx reserves her sympathy for the wry ones, the characters who have weathered so many storms that nothing surprises them, nothing blows them down.