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Summary
Summary
From the Pulitzer Prize-winning and bestselling author of The Shipping News and Accordion Crimes comes one of the most celebrated short story collections of our time.
Annie Proulx's masterful language and fierce love of Wyoming are evident in this collection of stories about loneliness, quick violence, and wrong kinds of love. In "The Mud Below," a rodeo rider's obsession marks the deepening fissures between his family life and self-imposed isolation. In "The Half-Skinned Steer," an elderly fool drives west to the ranch he grew up on for his brother's funeral, and dies a mile from home. In "Brokeback Mountain," the difficult affair between two cowboys survives everything but the world's violent intolerance.
These are stories of desperation, hard times, and unlikely elation, set in a landscape both brutal and magnificent. Enlivened by folk tales, flights of fancy, and details of ranch and rural work, they juxtapose Wyoming's traditional character and attitudes--confrontation of tough problems, prejudice, persistence in the face of difficulty--with the more benign values of the new west.
Stories in Close Range have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, and GQ. They have been selected for the O. Henry Stories 1998 and The Best American Short Stories of the Century and have won the National Magazine Award for Fiction. This is work by an author writing at the peak of her craft.
Reviews (1)
Kirkus Review
A vigorous second collection from Proulx (after Heart Songs and Other Stories, 1988): eleven nicely varied stories set in the roughhewn wasteland that one narrator calls a '97,000-square-miles dog's breakfast of outside exploiters, Republican ranchers and scenery.'' The characters here are windburned, fatalistic westerners stuck in the harsh lives they've made for themselves in this bitter demi-paradise. They include: hardworking, luckless ranchers (in the painfully concise ``Job History,'' and the sprawling ``Pair a Spurs,'' the latter a wry tale of divorce, sexual urgency, and sheer cussedness that bears fleeting resemblances to Proulx's Accordion Crimes); aging hellion Josanna Skiles (of ``A Lonely Coast'') and the lover who can neither tame her nor submit to her; a sagebrush Bluebeard and his inquisitive wife (in the amusingly fragmentary ``55 Miles to the Gas Pump''); and an itinerant rodeo cowboy (in ``The Mud Below'') whose vagrant spirit stubbornly kicks against memories of his disastrous childhood. Two stories are, effectively, miniature novels: ``People in Hell Just Want a Drink of Water,'' about memorably dysfunctional feuding families; and ``The Bunchgrass Edge of the World,'' which begins as a collection of random eccentricities, then coheres into a grimly funny parody of the family saga. ``The Blood Bay'' retells a familiar western folktale, adding just a whiff of Chaucer's ``Pardoner's Tale.'' And two prizewinning pieces brilliantly display Proulx's trademark whipsaw wit and raw, lusty language. ``The Half-Skinned Steer'' wrests a rich portrayal of the experience of unbelonging from the account of an old man's journey westward, for his brother's funeral, back to the embattled home he'd spent decades escaping. And the powerful ``Brokeback Mountain'' explores with plangent understated compassion the lifelong sexual love between two cowboys destined for separation, and the harsh truth that ``if you can't fix it you've got to stand it.'' Gritty, authoritative stories of loving, losing, and bearing the consequences. Nobody else writes like this, and Proulx has never written better.
