Annie Proulx: Bad Dirt

There is A kind of man in America who wouldn't be caught dead in a SUV.

This type of fellow does not care for holidaymakers, takes his coffee black and wakes each morning in the dark without an alarm clock. He probably knows grain prices inside out, and believes cigarettes are for fools. He may have gone to Vietnam, he may not. Either way, he doesn't moon too much at the surrounding mountains when he steps on to his porch in the morning frost. Independent, stubborn, and capable of outworking some of the horses he owns, he takes a certain pride in the Sisyphean nature of ranching in Wyoming, and no American writer knows him as well as Annie Proulx.

It's an eerie performance, this drag-show act Proulx has perfected in the last five years, during which she has got to know not just this man's walk and his talk, but the float and drift of his thoughts, the logic of his emotions. She first explored this kind of fellow in Close Range, (1999) a book of stories about rodeo riders, octogenarian ranchers and families on the verge of collapse.

Proulx took a one-book detour into west Texas with That Old Ace in the Hole (2002) but now she's back to Wyoming with Bad Dirt, a collection as baroquely morbid as anything else she has written. It's not clear if landscape shaped Annie Proulx or the other way around, but it seems she found her spiritual equal in Wyoming's unforgiving terrain. Here, after all, is a state where smoke signals are probably more effective than cellular phones, where the land is so parched it makes west Texas look like an oasis. It cackles at those who try to make a living from it, and kills some, too. In Man Crawling out of Trees a couple from New York gets a grim first impression of the place.

Every few months something inexplicably rural happens: on a back road one man shoots another with his great-grandfather's vintage buffalo gun; a newcomer from Iowa sets out for an afternoon hike, and falls off a cliff. Black bears come down in September and smash Eugenie's bird feeders. A hawk hides under the potentilla bush and leaps suddenly on an overconfident prairie dog. In Antler Spring, the town where they buy their alcohol and groceries, a woman expecting her first child is widowed when her husband, fighting summer wildfires in Colorado, is killed by a Pulaski tool that falls from a helicopter.

Rather than address the fracas with high dudgeon, Proulx goes laughing into the maw. She sets the tone with The Hellhole, a fanciful story about an express lane to the fiery below that has a knack for swallowing evildoers before the local fish and game warden has a chance to write them a ticket. "He didn't know what had happened," Proulx writes dryly of her hero's reaction, "but it had saved a lot of paperwork."

Like William Trevor and Alice Munro, Proulx is a master of compression. She can condense the entire arc of a life into one paragraph as she does here in What Furniture Would Jesus Pick?

"He wasn't lonely. There was his mother, he was a church deacon, a member of the Cattleman's Association, he went to his neighbour's potluck suppers and barbecues, and about once a month drove to town and got half-drunk, bought a woman, and made it back to the ranch before the old haymaker cleared the horizon. He was not a veteran but he knew all those who were and often went to the VFW with them to drink and listen to Vietnam stories."

Like Flannery O'Connor and William Faulkner, the two American maestros of the short story she most resembles, Proulx has found a tone and style of delivery that allows her to be humorous and existentially black at the same time. No other writer in America gets away with this combination.

* John Freeman is a writer in New York.

* London: 4th Estate, $31.99