News

FINE JUST THE WAY IT IS

By Annie Proulx

Scribner, 221 pages, $29.99

In the hands of most writers of the place (Gretel Ehrlich, James Galvin, Geoffrey O'Gara), Wyoming's chief romance lies in its space, its wind, its quick reach back to Old West days. But Annie Proulx has always been impatient with this romance and, in her latest collection of short stories, she dispenses with it (space, wind and the good old days are ruthless killers) just as determinedly as she did in her revolutionary Close Range and the two collections that followed, Bad Dirt and That Old Ace in the Hole.

And Proulx's Wyoming in her new stories is still "weeds, weeds and wildness," characteristically cruel and unforgiving. Luck is, as usual, largely a matter of interpretation, and the view coming home typically manifests as "a hammered red landscape in which ranch buildings appeared dark and sorrowful." And just as before, this latest collection of Wyoming tales is populated with people whose names sound as if they popped out of a cereal box: Bunk Peck, Fenk Fipps, Sink Garcell, Wacky Lipe (the effect has lost its initial charm and is beginning to feel like a distracting tic).

But even as there is much to recognize in these pages, something different, radically different even, has happened in Proulx's latest offering. For one thing, she has dispensed with the over-the-top dialogue of the earlier works. The characters in this latest story collection speak matter-of-factly, in recognizable English, like actual Wyomingites. And for another thing, not coincidentally perhaps, Proulx has considerably softened toward her characters. For the first time, there is an enduring sense of respect - a palpable, if reluctantly rendered, tenderness - for her Wyoming people. It's an astonishing departure from her usual arm's-length approach and the result is undeniably powerful.

There are nine stories in this collection; of these, two are oddly beneath Proulx and threaten to weaken the overall emotional strength of the whole. Set in hell, I've Always Loved This Place and Swamp Mischief show the Proulxian skeleton to unflattering effect. Her cantankerous wit, her clever structure, her underlying motivations are all bones and no feeling here, two too-obviously environmental rants that, because of their bony cynicism, do nothing to further the cause of a beleaguered planet.

"He had been bored the last few hundred years," Proulx writes of the Devil in the second of these stories, "with very little to do but wait ever since he had put certain observations of steam kettles into the head of a young Scots inventor. The kettle epiphany had booted a species - selfish, clever creatures with poor impulse control ... into a savagely technological civilization that got rapidly out of hand and sent them blundering toward The End."

In the hands of a lesser writer, such stories would be clever conceits, but we've come to expect so much more from Proulx - master of the hidden stitch, commander-in-chief of painful observations - that the stories feel more like literary exercises than anything full-blooded.

In addition to the two hell stories, there's an oddly fantastical sagebrush tale and a historical riff on bison hunting which are less than brilliant, but the four weaker stories are only shown up as such because the remaining five are so strong that each of them alone is well worth the price of admission. In these, an emotionally accessible Proulx - a Proulx who seems at last to be unafraid of her own heart in this heartless landscape - surprises and delights with what amounts to uncharacteristic touches of kindness: the sad reminiscences of an elderly Ray Forkenbrock in Family Man; the almost unbearably "short run" of Archie and Rose McLaverty in Them Old Cowboy Songs; the age-old fate of a modern young couple in Testimony of the Donkey.

But the most moving story of the collection, perhaps, is the final, Tits Up in a Ditch. Proulx has real sympathy for her characters, even as she exposes their fatally small-minded ways. "Wyomin'," according to the worn out, washed-up patriarch of the story, "is fine just the way it is." His refusal to change, to soften, to love - yes, love in a Proulx story! - leads to heartbreak of such horrific magnitude that the reader is left breathless.

Even in Proulx's celebrated Brokeback Mountain (from the collection Close Range), her story was less about the heartbreak of individual love than about the injustice of system that allowed such heartbreak to happen. But by bringing the heartbreak home to the ranch, as she does here, Proulx gives it a poignancy that seems new for her. "She realized that every ranch had lost a boy, lost them early and late," Proulx writes of Dakotah, the grieving teen mother and Iraq war veteran, in Tits Up in a Ditch.

Dakotah, having lost her best friend and an arm in Iraq, must now somehow cope with the news that her toddler died in a ranch accident while she was away. "The trip along this road was a roll call of grief," Proulx writes, as the devastated young woman is driven home. It is here, Proulx suggests, on lonely ranch roads, that the price of the war in Iraq, the true cost of the United States' failed energy policy, the casualties of our see-sawing economy, are truly felt.

"I have asked a lot of my emotions," F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in his Notebooks at the height of his short-story writing career in the mid-1930s. "The price was high ... because there was one little drop of something not blood, not a tear, not my seed, but me more intimately than these, in every story, it was the extra I had." The extra Proulx has at last given us in at least five of these new Wyoming stories is herself, more intimately than ever before. The price of such emotional generosity to a woman known for her self-protective, prickly reserve must have been enormous, but the result is a breathtaking, affecting triumph.

Wyoming resident Alexandra Fuller is the author most recently of The Legend of Colton H. Bryant.