Customer Reviews

Close Range: Wyoming Stories

5 star:		(36)
4 star:		(14)
3 star:		(10)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(10)

 

 

After reading a couple of stories of Annie Proulx's collection "Close Range: Wyoming Stories" I started feeling the line that kept the narrative together was the familiar feeling. But near the end, when I reached a tale called "The Governors of Wyoming", I realized that they are also about ranching.

At a point in this very same story, a character states that "the main thing about ranching (...), last as long as you can, make things come out so's it's still your ranch when it is time to get buried. That's my take on it". This statement is clear what keeps all the stories together in this collection. In a way, or another, the main characters --and the main plot of narrative-- are dealing with forces --be them another person, destiny etc-- that are trying to steal their ranch.

However, the family ties are another acting force --that may help to keep the ranch or lose it. There are always conflicts between siblings, husband and wives, mothers and sons. And another major theme is the intolerance that is all around us most of the time.

This theme is the main object in the last --and probably the best --story, called "Brokeback Mountain" that narrates the relationship between to male cowboys that fall in love with each other. Due to their inhospitable environment their affair is fated to surrender. But if this is not a surprise, the dignity and beauty with Proulx deals with the characters that is an amazing thing.

The stories have different objectives and paces. Take "Job History" for instance. It is so fast that sometimes looks like a newsreel. And so it could be, because it is the story of members of a family that are so busy with their own lives that they end up missing the history that is happening in their times. And it --history -- is interfering in their lives more than they realize or wanted to. Contrary to "Mountain" this is a very fast narrative.

Each story has its own appeal and is dealt in a different way. "The Bunchgrass Edge of the World" stars like a regular one, but when its touches of surrealism begins, it becomes something very unusual, and one of the best of the collection.

Much more accessible than Proulx's Pulitzer and National Book Prize winner "The Shipping News", "Close Range: Wyoming Stories" is a real treat to readers who like a sophisticated prose, written with heart, soul and smartness. It reads like Cormac McCarthy's best.

Like most anthologies it is not easy to keep a high level all the time --but the writer succeeds most of the time. Of course, there are stories that I like better than other ones, but, as whole, I think the book is so good that it is impossible not to give it my highest recommendations.

I'm not quite sure what to make of this collection. I loved AP's writing style and wanted to be drawn into the stories. However the problem was that once was I was in the stories I wasn't sure I wanted to be there - I found the subject matter a little too depressing - I had imagined stoical countryfolk living bleak but dignified lives against a magnificent, uncompromising landscape. Instead I was a little taken aback by the undignified and squalid behaviour of the charactors and how they all seem doomed to end up unhappy. Surely their are SOME happy marriages/parent-child relationships in this part of the world? I liked 'Brokeback Mountain' but the rest of the stories seemed a bit samey. I've never been to America but based on AP's view of it, I think I would give Wyoming a wide berth!

In some ways Ms Prolux reminds me of Thomas Hardy - the same tales of lives predestined to unhappiness against the uncaring splendour of nature - but unlike Hardy she appears to lack a sense of humour/or any compassion for her characters. Her characters have no nobility, hence it becomes difficult for the reader to empathise with their plight.

I am a grown-up, middle aged man not drawn much to sentimentality. I am not a practiced reader of fiction and I have spent only one night in Wyoming. I just finished reading the final story in the collection, "Brokeback Mountain",about ten minutes ago.

I still have tears in my eyes. It seems to me that I am still falling out of a dream into the wet and chill February morning by San Francisco Bay where I now live. But the dream was of a place utterly familiar. I mean, emotionally familiar, familiar in memory, and evidently, familiar to my body. I can still feel the tingling just behind my cheekbones and the low-voltage electric discomfort in my chest. I guess Annie Proulx touched something in the geography of my own soul with her story. And even in the sadness that swirls around my eyes, I am grateful to her for that. And amazed that this woman could write so tellingly of men's hearts.

I said that I am a middle-aged man. So I have a history behind me. That's part of what makes you middle-aged. When you're young, who you want to be someday is the largest part of who you are. When you're middle-aged, the evidence begins to mount. The past is what it was and that is the largest part of who you are. It's harder to make believe anymore. And the story includes loss, confusion, missed opportunities, cowardice, fear, and memories of your own Brokeback Mountain. And sometimes the only redemption for the past, if it is redemption, is to remember it, fully. That's all.

Now that I am back in the waking world a bit more, I also want to say that Annie Proulx weaves the English language beautifully, with the kind of strength, color and contrapuntal roughness that makes it so earthy and satisfying. There were a few passages that I read out loud, just for the rhythm, the accents, the tumbled spring-thaw rush of sound. In a story about people not noted either for reflective insight or poetic diction, she has, paradoxically, by her own re-membering of them, let them be themselves, without apology, and yet re-situated them in a place of human grandeur.

I guess Aristotle had a point when he wrote about poetry as a moment of katharsis, of the compelling power of pity and fear. I bet he never thought he could find it on Brokeback Mountain.

After carefully anylising Proulx character development and precise diction it seems to me that the whether the characters depicted by Proulx capture the spirit of Wyoming is irrelevant. Each of these characters should be taken both in correlation with the setting and also they should be allowed to stand on their own. These characters should serve to titilate by thier absurd responses to life, not to portray an active representation of the Wyoming landscape. Proulx makes a very conscious effort to seperate Wyoming from her characters. If fact you could say that Wyoming could be seen as an individual character. Each character interacts with eachother but they are not to be taken as the same thing.

Well, it amuses me to see all of these reviews by people from the East Coast and Midwest and California telling us here in Wyoming how much this "is" Wyoming or "isn't" Wyoming. It's an entertaining book, it flirts with, and occasionally hits the truth right on the nail head, and it's not the entire picture of Wyoming either. The stories all contain elements of Wyoming, both what it was, and what it still is, but they tend to run towards the dark side, the brutal side, the barren side, both of Wyoming's climate and geography, and of its people. I'm not one of Wyoming's few city dwellers - I live and work with cattle and wildlife every day, I'm out there on the -30 degree days, I see some ugly things and some incredibly beautiful things, and I think that's what resonated with me about this book. I saw my friends and neighbors and enemies in this book, and that's what kept me turning pages. I wish I'd seen a little more of the splendor, the hope, the grace, and the wonder of Wyoming, but what the heck, I didn't write it. Quite a good bit of Wyoming marches to its own drummer, and you can drive miles and miles on most of our roads without seeing other folks, and we like things that way. Enjoy the book or don't, but don't gripe about the kernels of truth in it or your perceived notions about how it's wrong or right about Wyoming from your highrise condo in some eastern city. It's close enough for us born and raised here.

Brothers Grimm dealt in folklore, myth and truth using language that confronted, that did not hide, say, an act of cannibalism, and revealed in their stories some of our fears, hopes and dreams. Ms Proulx has, in CLOSE RANGE, created a language that reflects the nature of the characters who inhabit this landscape, a language which is cryptic, dense, and evocative and does not hide, say, an act of love between two men. The language is a triumph, sweeping the reader along in its power, immersing the reader in the world of the rancher, cowhand, rodeo riders and sheepherders, their search for love, for money, their recognition of meaning through their work, in a landscape more of a hell than an El Dorado. She can sum a character up in a sentence and there is more than a little humour in the hundreds of proper nouns which sparkle and colour her stories - people like Car, Skipper, Cake, Freeze, Hulse, Haul, and Wrench; places like Brokeback, Fiddle and Bow, Slope, Casper. Vivid characterisations - Mrs Freeze and Ottaline are especially memorable but so are Jack Twist and Ennis Del Mar. Issues such as the transformation of the west through tourism and corporate ownership make the stories resonate and the metaphor of the lumbering Cadillac slumping off into a ditch at night in the snow in minus 10 degrees weather may say more about modern man and nature than the collected works of many others.
There is magic at work here, no less than there is in the works of Brothers Grimm, but there's much more too.

It is hard to imagine these stories being printed if the author hadn't won a Pulitzer Prize for earlier work. The charactors are flat, quickly drawn by highlighting eccentricities and hick-speech patterns. They do not develop, learn, or even make you care because they remain hollow figures devoid of inner life, finely shaded emotions or anything two diminsional. The treatment of the landscape is about the same - while The West and ranching figure in plots, you can not once envision a place from her descriptions or feel its prescence. The only thing that works is a few plots that amble along - but even that only sometimes works: consider the flat drone of a plot such as Job History, which is nothing but a list of jobs held and what was on tv at the time. If you are looking for a book to capture "the west" - whatever your idea of that might be - tough, romantic, whatever - this is not it. If you are looking for a book that is literary and a good read, this is also not it - it is a book that finally is all about the author's own voice - a rather flat and dull voice when you get too close, with no range at all.

The first thing I'm going to say is that I only read half this book. If you wish, you can take that as a commentary on the book, or a commentary on the reviewer. Either way, I suppose it's an indication of something.

I read this book, or half of it, because a friend lent it to me out of the blue. Willing as I am to try new things, especially those that gravitate from apparent randomness, I picked it up and gave it the old college try...which is exactly where I felt I was after a few pages.

This book brought me back to Expository Writing class from my freshman year in college. This is a collection of short stories that slowly meander, not necessarily with a point, but rich in word energy. I use the expression 'word energy' here because the value in this book is the language, not the tale itself. At least for me this was the case. Your mileage, as they say, may vary.

I can't shake the feeling that this collection exists merely for the author to proclaim, "Boy, I miss Wyoming, but it sure does suck." Or something similar, with more descriptive words. Since my freshman year of college was 13 years ago, I'm not being forced to analyze every paragraph to an absurd degree. As such, the stories of this book sort of meander through the plains of Wyoming, gliding from one page to the next, but never going anywhere.

I imagine this is perfectly fine for some people, but I feel I'm being led on a walk through a corn field. While some people like to walk in corn fields, it's not my thing. And that's what this book is...or isn't. It isn't my thing. I don't relate to any of these stories; none of them speak to me. I don't think it's bad, per se. But my relation to these anecdotes is almost entirely non-existent.

So there you go. To me, it's an average book. And I think it's enjoyably written in some places. But I don't see many of these stories with a direction. They roll, they plod, they wisp. But in the end, they don't go anywhere. Granted, each reader will have their own opinion of how this compilation touches them. And that's the great thing about books. But for me, it wasn't a very enlightening walk.

This sordid, dark, ugly filth is not the Wyoming my grandparents hailed from. I have known many persons from ranches in that state and they are hard working, forthright and resourceful. They may not be saints but they are nothing like this mess. Spend your money on something else, like a nice travel guide to Wyoming and go see for yourself what a rigerous, diverse country this really is. There are fewer people in Wyoming per sq. mile than there are in Alaska as well as a far more diverse wildlife population. The folks there have better things to do than live like this book.

Annie Proulx's voice lands somewhere between the savagely humorous stories of Flannery O'Connor and the sparse and romantic beauty of Raymond Carver -- which, I suppose, is geographically appropriate.
I am a resident of Wyoming. I am not from here and I do not plan to stay here. I have little love for the barren landscape or the tough people of this land -- I would rather be in a cafe in San Francisco or a coffee shop in Greenwich Village. But I have seen enough of this place to validate the authenticity of Proulx's vision of this land, to a point anyway. Like anyplace, there are more people who watch too much TV and eat too many Oreos than there are who lead these lives of clenched teeth and fists.

For being about Wyoming, which they fully are, these stories cover a lot of ground. From the Blood Bay, a wonderfully humorous rewrite of a familiar ranch legend, to a story about a bullrider to anti-beef radical activists to a tractor who makes love to an overweight and lonely girl to the crowning story about two tough cowboys and their unusual love for each other, Annie Proulx's imagination almost makes up for the lack of imagination of everyone else in this state.

I will buy this book as a memoir of my year in this barren state. I will recommend this book as an excellent collection of stories from a remarkable writer about a tough land.