Fine Just The Way It Is: Wyoming Stories 3 [Audiobook, Unabridged] [Audio CD]

Annie Proulx's trilogy of Wyoming short stories "Close Range", "Bad Dirt" and now "Fine Just The Way It Is" is about a landscape and its people. In the latest collection, three strong Proulx 'Wyoming specials' - drawing on early pioneering struggles (Them Old Cowboy Songs), hardship spanning the Great Depression years (The Great Divide) and life in present-day Wyoming (Tits Up In A Ditch) - open a window into the lives of Wyoming people, past and present. To these three stories of hardscrabble lives lived out in the American West add two other modern well-told stories, "Testimony of the Donkey" and "Family Man", plus the entertaining "The Sagebrush Kid", a story of mysterious vanishings Bermuda Triangle style, transplanted to the Wyoming plains : six stories in all firmly stamped with the Proulx 'Wyoming' trademark. Two further stories are set in Hell - more on that later!

Some of Annie Proulx's best Wyoming short stories, "Brokeback Mountain" for instance, from the collection "Close Range", flow out of the landscape. Proulx's power of conveying landscape is exemplary, with Wyoming's bleak, forbidding landscape of vast windswept plains or rugged mountains often as powerful a player as any character in a story - clearly exemplified here by "Testimony of the Donkey", a contemporary story set against the stark, scenic grandeur of Wyoming's mountainous terrain where the landscape all but becomes a character.

"Them Old Cowboy Songs", a sad story stepping out of the vast Wyoming prairie landscape of the 1880's, records the devastating pioneering experience of two young newly-weds in their remote homestead, confronted by poverty, isolation and a cruel landscape. Annie Proulx doesn't do 'sentimental' : what she does do in her distinctive unsparing prose is stark reality treatment of the West, uncompromising portraits of Wyoming folk hard-pressed to scrape to-gether a living faced with the grinding challenges of a hardscrabble prairie existence. Some homesteaders toughed it out through the hard times but others, desperate, defeated and disappointed, struggled on in vain, had "short runs" - and lost, their hopes of living the frontier dream swept away.

When I pick up a Proulx short story, I expect Wyoming, not Hell - unless it's the special brand of Wyoming hell reserved for Dakotah Lister in the memorable contemporary story, "Tits Up In A Ditch". Joining the Army promises respite for the young recruit from a life at home full of setbacks where it seemed everything that could go wrong, did go wrong. Discharged from military service in Iraq, Dakotah returns home to Wyoming to the realisation that her past sufferings - at home and in Iraq - may pale in comparison with what her future holds in store..... Another modern story, "Family Man", recounts the recollections of old, 80+ ranch-hand Ray Forkenbrock, seeing out his days in a nursing home. But something weighing heavily on his mind rankles Ray : dirty laundry - an ugly family secret of an "old betrayal" he's kept bottled up inside himself for years.....

As well as the strange, inexplicable disappearances of man and beast recounted in "The Sagebrush Kid", the different time-frames present in the story give a strong sense of the wheels of history turning as the winds of change swept through Wyoming - the stagecoach business consigned to history by the Union Pacific Railroad pushing through, old stage roads swallowed up in time by interstate highway, huge chunks of prairie vanishing under the drills of oil and gas exploration. A tall tale that gives pause for thought about how the west has changed.

What a helluva shock to discover two stories, comic interludes really, are set in Hell - yes HELL! Outwith the bounds of Wyoming altogether! OUTSIDERS! Trespassers from Hell wandering like stray mavericks into country where they don't rightfully belong - and looking oddly out of place among prime stock. Range wars have broken out for less! Long-time followers of Annie Proulx's topnotch Wyoming stories, past and present, may view the stories from Hell as being out of kilter - interlopers into 'settled territory' that was fine just the way it was. After all, "who needs Hell when you've got Wyoming?"

Annie Proulx continues her mastery of the short story.

In Fine Just the Way It Is: Wyoming Stories 3, Proulx once again gives us stories primarily taking place in or associated with Wyoming. Her characters are terribly human--warts and all--and her stories are typically blunt, to the point, and full of (sometimes brief) life.

But, as straightforward as her stories are with their plainspoken characters, Proulx also delivers stunningly beautiful narrative language when detailing landscapes, flora, and animal life. Some of her imagery literally astounded me it was so well crafted and provocative.

However, unlike previous Wyoming volumes, this addition to the series is far more brutal to its characters. Now Proulx has never occurred to me as a woman who gets overly sentimental about her creations, but I was surprised at the tragedies she forced her men and women to endure. That being said, she certainly did not cross the line into sensationalism; everything she threw at her characters was well within reality's parameters.

Well, for the most part.

I was especially happy that in three stories in particular, Proulx exits her normally grounded repertoire and gives us something bordering fantasy. Now, because it's Proulx, we're not talking Tolkien here, but two of her stories hilariously focus on the devil and the other, well, I don't want to spoil anything, but it features a sagebrush where mysterious disappearances persist. I think that with her particular style and sensibilities, calling them tall tales may be more appropriate than fantasy.

Consequently, I sensed a real sense of dark humor in these stories, and I loved it! While most of the stories were very serious in terms of subject matter, they all utilized a morose fun that--unless happening to us--demanded a chuckle or two.

All in all, this collection was a bit of a break from Proulx in terms of style, especially when read between the lines, but every bit as exquisitely written and enjoyable as past works.

Proulx's talent is unrelenting with each new work she releases.

~Scott William Foley, author of The Imagination's Provocation: Volume II

This book is a mishmash of different story styles, and not all of them as successful as the author's trademark accounts of life in the American West (past and present). There are three good examples of that genre here, and they surely must mark the end of her affair with Wyoming. Her usual grimly comic vision, still harboring a bit of romance for far-flung places and people living on the margins, has gone "tits up in a ditch" in this third collection of her western stories.

What might have been tragic ironies that resonate in the heart, as we find them in "Brokeback Mountain," have now evolved into outright despair. Moments of joy are so fleeting they barely have a chance to live and breathe before they die in the face of bad luck and life's cruelties. It would be hard to find anywhere a portrayal of life on the frontier (then and now) that attempts more openly to reduce the myth of pioneer spirit to a living nightmare. Reading this book I was reminded of the Richard Avedon photos of the people of the West, beaten down and ravaged, barely hanging on to their dignity. This is an American West rarely found in fiction since Dorothy Scarborough's "The Wind." Not recommended for anybody whose heroes have always been cowboys.