KEY POINTS:
FINE JUST THE WAY IT IS
By Annie Proulx
(HarperCollins, $29.99)
It seems to me that Annie Proulx loves the land much more than she does the people who struggle to live on it. In this gritty collection of short stories she writes lyrically of the landscapes of the American Midwest, the willows making a ragged line of sombre maroon, the stock pond at the bottom of the hill as flat as zinc, the sky drooping over the undulating prairie like unrolled bolts of dirty wool.
This is familiar territory for Proulx but she never grows stale writing about it. There seems to be a yearning for a time when the plains of Wyoming really were wild, not filled up with the noise of people and their cars.
No, Proulx doesn't appear to like people much. There's no redemption and no hope for the characters in this collection of stories. Whether she's writing of the pioneers who "had short runs and were quickly forgotten" or of an old cowboy who's decided it's finally time to tell the family secret that has haunted him all his life, no one gets what they had hoped for.
With this collection, Proulx seems to have cornered the market in American tragedy. For generation after generation there are no happy endings. Even in death they suffer. Two darkly humorous stories are set in hell where the Devil is renovating in a bid to make things even more unpleasant for its inmates.
There are a few jarring notes within the collection and The Devil is one of them. He and his pathological hatred of Tour de France cyclists seem out of place. Then there's a story about a man-eating sagebrush that is just plain weird and one story, Deep-Blood-Greasy-Bowl, about Native American Indians hunting bison that I raced through so desperate was I for it to be over. Where Proulx's writing is at its finest is in her pessimistic tales of ordinary people struggling to make their lives better and failing every time.
Proulx has been a published author for more than two decades and along the way has acquired some of the baubles that help attract a wider audience: a Pulitzer for The Shipping News, a clutch of awards for the movie version of Brokeback Mountain. If there is a weakness in this new collection of stories it is their unrelenting bleakness. And yet you can't help admiring her for not compromising, not paying off the mainstream with palatable happy endings but instead giving voice to the failures, the misfits, the broken, the unloved and the forgotten.
For the most part these stories are visceral, bold and intense, an uncomfortable and powerful read.
- Detours, HoS
