Annie Proulx

Annie Proulx rarely disappoints serious readers with her work, and CLOSE RANGE: WYOMING STORIES (1999) was a pure pleasure for this old book lover. Ever since THE SHIPPING NEWS I've been a fan. Of course the centerpiece of this collection is the last story, "Brokeback Mountain," since successfully adapted for the screen, and a heartbreaker of a tale. But the other stories here are equally good, all about hardscrabble ranching types or broken down rodeo riders, some admirable, some not. Like show more Diamond "Shorty" Felts, a bull rider who thinks nothing of assaulting the wives and girlfriends of his rodeo pals ("The Mud Below"). Or the trio of hard-used women in "A Lonely Coast," one of whom declares, "Listen, if it's got four wheels or a dick you're goin a have trouble with it, guaranteed." And "Job History" chronicles a life of failed businesses, bankruptcy, deaths by truck accidents, cancer and more. A couple stories make mention of TV stars and other wealthy millionaires who buy failed ranches to "play cowboys." And I will myself admit that place names like Arizona, Montana or Wyoming have always evoked widescreen scenes of cattle drives and heroic gun fighters who come to save the ranchers' daughters from unscrupulous bad guys. But Proulx moves in to give us an extreme "close range" look at lives lived on the raw edges of failed dreams, disappointment and dire poverty.

Short story collections, always a hard sell, are often kind of a crap shoot in regard to quality, but I have to tell ya, there is not a bad one in this whole bunch. Annie Proulx is a quality writer. Very highly recommended.

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER show less

Why have so few of my GR friends reviewed this brilliant book by such a well-known author? Note: The first two pages have a rather brutal scene (though the details are vague), but there's nothing else like that in the rest of the book, and everything that follows, arises from this incident.

This is Proulx's first novel, published a year before the excellent The Shipping News. It's equally good, but has a very different structure, and the language is not as distinctively clipped or show more telegraphic.

It tells the stories of the diverging lives of the Blood family (impoverished farmers in Vermont), from the mid '40s until the '70s or '80s, along with the stories of others involved in their lives. The environment is harsh, the people tough, but the landscapes often beautiful - and Proulx's writing switches effortlessly to reflect these contrasts.

Most of the chapters start with a postcard to or from one of the protagonists. Sometimes it explains what's going to happen in the chapter, but at other times it's just a side story. You only ever see the written side; never the picture. You could almost treat the book as a collection of short stories, or even read just the postcards and try to cobble it all together, though I wouldn't recommend the latter unless you've already read the book.

SYNOPSIS
The Blood family consists of Mink and Jewell (father and mother), sons in their 20s (at the start), Loyal and Dub (Marvin), and teenage daughter, Mernelle. Loyal is a devoted, intuitive and knowledgeable farmer; Dub has always been slow, aimless and reckless, and Mernelle is dreamy.

On the first page, Loyal's girlfriend, Billy, dies. He blames himself, and is even more sure everyone else will blame him, so he hides the body, and leaves family and farm. "It wasn't the idea that he could go anywhere, but the idea that he had to go somewhere." It remains ambiguous as to how justified his haunted guilt at her death is, but it never leaves him. And somehow, well before the end of the book, it's hard to hate Loyal for what he did.

Loyal spends his life travelling the USA, doing a variety of mostly outdoor jobs (trapping, mining, prospecting, farming), meeting intriguing characters along the way. He sends the occasional postcard home, and always hankers after a farm and family of his own, though his inability to get intimate with women makes the latter impossible. He realises "The price for getting away. No wife, no family, no children, no human comfort in the quotidian unfolding of his life". Meanwhile, his absence, and lack of return address, changes the lives of all those he leaves behind.

NAILS
There is a striking description on the second page, "her nails glowed with the luminous hardness that marks the newly dead", and this lodged in my mind, priming me to notice the many, many references to nails (finger, toe, claw, and metal) that followed: at least 20 in the first 125 pages, then none that I noticed for over 100 pages, and just a smattering from there to the end.

Nails are key for Loyal, too: when he first met Billy, "her nails gleamed", and years later, he still remembers "the flash of her nails" and how pointed they were.

Neatly, the final two mentions of nails that I spotted also relate to the dead or dying.

There's a whole thesis in these nails, and a far more interesting one than the meaning of postcards (Mernelle has a friend who collects them) or bears (hunted, toy ones collected by Mernelle, as well as being on a job lot of postcards).

LANGUAGE - and NAMES
Most of the chapters are a chunk of narrative about one or more characters, but at regular intervals, there's a short one called "What I See". These are in the present tense, and much more stream-of-consciousness, often featuring lush descriptions of an arid landscape, or something rather abstract.

It's a feature of all the chapters that it's not always immediately obvious who it's about, which keeps you turning the pages (and isn't drawn out to an irritating degree).

As in all the Proulx I've read, many of the characters have unusual names. Often they are pertinent, or oxymoronic, or maybe both (e.g. Loyal Blood), but others are just bizarre: a man called Toot Nipples, for example! But there are limits: even Loyal thinks it odd that a man named his mule after his daughter.

CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT
This is a great strength of the book: so many characters over so many decades, and they change a great deal, but it feels like a plausible reaction to circumstances (except for Dub), and I really felt I knew and understood them. When Mernelle grows up "there was a sureness in her that estranged her from the old child's life".

OPTIMISM, PESSIMISM, FATE
Early on, we're told the Bloods have a "knack for doing the wrong thing", and that largely proves true. Later, Ben the amateur astronomer says to Loyal "I see the way you throw yourself at trouble. Punish yourself with work. How you don't get anywhere except a different place."

There are a couple of recurring themes that ought to be depressing, and yet the characters are always hopeful of things getting better (and some things do), so overall, it isn't a depressing book.

* Thwarted longing for children (and of those who do have them, most are painfully estranged)
* Valuable things, long saved-up for or treasured, are lost, destroyed or stolen

Although Proulx isn't crass enough to spell it out, they're all striving for The American Dream, but most never quite reach it, and Loyal in particular, wants to do "something of value".

FREEDOM OR BURDEN OF TRAVEL?
Loyal doesn't feel he has much of a choice about travelling, and is resigned to it. In contrast, the liberation his mother finds when she learns to drive in her fifties, is joyous: "continuity broke: when she drove, her stifled youth unfurled like a ribbon" and "the pleasure of choosing which turns and roads to take" is a literal and metaphorical description of her empowerment. Driving also gives her a new appreciation of landscape: "When you'd been driving with your eyes on the road for hours, you wanted to let them stretch out to the boundaries of the earth." And yet, in keeping with the theme of valuable things being lost, even this has a sting in its tale.

OUTSIDERS
Initially, the Bloods are atavistically tied to their land, but as the stories diverge, they (and others) become outsiders.
* Incomers "moved into farm houses hoping to fit their lives into the rooms, to fit their shoes to the stair treads".
* An incomer was "urban in habitat but haunted from childhood by fantasies of wilderness".

"This family has a habit of disappearing. Everyone... is gone except me. And I'm the end of it."

IS THERE ONLY ONE WAY TO LOVE; CAN ONE CHANGE?
The first is is a question Loyal asks himself, and it's a slightly troubling one. Because of the ongoing trauma of how Billy died, if he becomes aroused by a woman, he has a panic attack and passes out. So he has occasional relationships with men (though this is never explicit). Assuming he was straight in the first place, it's odd he doesn't seem to struggle with this more. Or maybe he never was straight, and perhaps the fact his girlfriend had a masculine name is indicative?

QUOTES ABOUT LANDSCAPE
* "The October afternoon collapsed into evening."
* "Evening haze... blurred a sky discolored like a stained silk skirt."
* "The overclouded sky was as dull as old wire."
* "Heat ricocheted off the colorless rocks. Nothing moved. The sky leaned on them, the earth pressed upward."
* "The work of his hands had changed the land... The smooth fields were echoes of himself in the landscape."
* "The atavistic yearning that swept him when he stood beneath the trees... he was in an ancient time that lured him but which he could not understand in any way... The kernel of life , tiny, heavy, deep red in color, was secreted in these gabbling woods."
* Florida swamp: "Dub feels the canoe slip through the tea-colored water, sees the water ruptured by iridescent gas bubbles, patterned by the checkerboard backs and wood-knot eyes of alligators, clouds of egrets slanting out of the choked trees... The plangent call of rain crown under the long layers of clouds like pressed black linen."
* "Water charged with leaves raced in the gutters, wet boots flashed like flints. The window of his house shone in the darkness like squares of melting butter."#
* "The teeth of autumn gnawed at the light."

OTHER QUOTES
* "His peculiar voice that was both sweet and grainy, like the meat of a pear."
* "The barn stank of ammonia, sour milk, cloying hay and wet iron."
* A husband "had crushed her into a corner of life". Widowhood isn't always bad.
* Half brothers who only recently met bond over land, "The property was like an ear-trumpet through which they could understand each other."
* "The electric feeling of quick money was everywhere" amongst those prospecting with Geiger counters.
* "The dulled eyes in their heavy hammocks of flesh were as incurious as those of a street musician."
* "The woman's shape was as formless as poured sugar."
* "He'd trained himself by now to need and want little... The unsecured scaffolding of his life rested on forgetting." show less

A Sicilian makes a two-button accordion and then goes to La Merica with his son, Silvano. There, they encounter racism and suspicion, are lumped together with all "Italians" and find themselves competing for jobs with black men. The story then unfolds following the accordion's travels to German immigrants in the midwest, to Mexican Americans in Texas, through time and various immigrant experiences.

This is probably one of the most complicated stories we've read for my library book club. The show more one story is essentially eight longish short stories detailing the lives of many characters, moving back and forth in time to tell individual's stories, all the while the accordion features in some way, small or large, sweeping through almost a century. There are moments of humor, but most of the tale is bleak and does not shy away from horrors of death or reversals of fortune. By the end, I was bracing myself for the next awful thing to happen. The writing is lovely, descriptive, and keeps you reading at a slower pace pondering these characters and their lives. WE will have plenty to discuss from the immigrant experience to the power of music to the intricacies of the plot. show less

The theme running through all of these stories is the hardness of the place where they are set, how it takes lives--either violently and unexpectedly, or slowly wearing them down over years into tough, bitter nubs. Yes, the stories are bleak, and a couple even border on horror (or Western gothic?), but Proulx's writing is so precise and evocative and such a pleasure to read. The final story is "Brokeback Mountain," a heart-breaking love story and Proulx's writing at its finest.