Close Range: Brokeback Mountain and Other stories

The conventional wisdom in short stories, I feel, is that they encompass short periods of time and examine the profound significance of small events. The stories in Close Range, however, seem to take the opposite approach - lifetimes are squeezed into ten or twenty pages, the distilled essence of memories are arranged like objects on a table that, taken together, capture the undercurrent of entire lives. In this way they read like novels that have been boiled down, their steam piped through an alembic and held in rough, miniature bottles which, as you would expect, are as potent as anything.

Proulx's prose reminds me, strangely enough, of both Alice Munro and Lucius Shepard, but with a stronger poetry and a sense of control that every now and then she relaxes a little, allowing her language to go deliciously over the top. The subtitle to this collection - Wyoming Stories - clues us in to the real protagonist of these stories: the Wyoming landscape. Proulx evokes the forests and mountains and plains and ranchlands and small towns so vividly I could smell the mud and the livestock and the diesel exhaust from the tractor trailers flying past on the interstate.

But more than just a poetically rendered the landscape, Proulx's Wyoming shapes the lives of her characters almost like a distant god: in the Half Skinned Steer, the unforgiving snow and the rocky outcroppings of an old ranch road literally brings the main character face to face with a demon from his past; in Brokeback Mountain, well, it's the mountain itself that casts a shadow over those two unhappy (or only briefly happy) lives. The attachment to the ranching life is a running theme here - people who won't give up the land despite its dire economics, who give themselves over to dude ranching or working for rich out of towners come to live a fantasy cowboy lifestyle, or, in one story, who go so far as to kill off livestock in a radical attempt to save the natural environment. These are people who are drunk on the land, made delusional by it and destroyed by it. And, by the end, it's hard not to envy them.

Eccentrica, durissima, commovente, ironica, drammatica, straziante. Davvero eccellente questa raccolta di racconti, di cui fa parte il celeberrimo Brokeback Mountain (ma non è l’unica perla qui presente).
Le storie ti riducono a uno straccio, ma la prosa, nella sua complessità, è vivida, minuziosa, ogni racconto ha una diversa sfumatura di intensità e le descrizioni del Wyoming sono visivamente efficaci, posso vedere le tempeste, il vento, la polvere… La natura, i paesaggi sono impressionanti, tanto da assurgere al ruolo di protagonisti e dare la sensazione di poter influenzare i personaggi e la storia che sta per accadere.
Ci vuole un’anima sensibile e coraggiosa per vedere tanta bellezza nella durezza della vita, tanta profondità nella banalità della vita.
Brava, Annie!

fantastic short stories.
highlights include: "The Mud Below", "Job History", "The Blood Bay", "People in Hell Just Want a Drink of Water", "Pair a Spurs", "A Lonely Coast", and "Brokeback Mountain".

I really enjoyed Annie Proulx’s writing style and voice, even the shortest of stories with 55 Miles to the Gas Pump fully immersed you into the story. However, there were several times that I put it down and debated whether or not to pick it up. There’s a recurring theme of sexual assault through the various stories that I found unnecessary to the stories themselves and made it difficult to push through.

Maybe that’s on me for not researching the book before hand though, evident in how I had no idea that Proulx wrote THE Brokeback Mountain which is the final story in this collection, and a great one at that. Having seen the film a handful of times it doesn’t even compare to the story (which is why I’m giving it 3 stars instead of 2).

Annie Proulx writes that special kind of way that had me rereading passages and pages just to savor it. Each story is unique from the others, and yet as a collection, Wyoming Stories paints a cohesive picture of the state I fell in love with as a kid. We had a nice roadtrip to Yellowstone some time ago

Did this book take me 2 months to finish? Yeah. That’s on me.

I had someone tell me I fell off……………………. Ooo I needed that!!!!

The star of this collection is "Brokeback Mountain," and my review and rating are specific to that story.

Ennis and Jack hire on as sheep tenders for the summer, and come to love one another. But they each go their own way, marrying and having children. Still, they "just can't quit you," and meet once or twice a year for "fishing" expeditions. The story covers 20 years of their relationship in spare language - so much is said by what is NOT said. A powerful story that haunts the reader long after it is finished. (The movie, with a screenplay by Larry McMurtry, is nothing short of wonderful.)

I appreciated this almost as well as the third in her collection of “Wyoming Stories”,  Fine Just the Way It Is . There is a lot of variety among the eleven stories, but it has cohesion from the Wyoming setting and common struggles of people there to achieve their dreams, whether it’s ranching or rodeo bull riding. They keep you on your toes, as some stories end with a bang and others with a whimper, some stay coast downward in gritty reality and others break into the fantasy of a ghost story or mythic shaggy dog tale.

Like most other readers, my favorite story is the one with the most emotional draw, “Brokeback Mountain.” I am not usually a fan of short stories because I always seem to want more. But the compression of this form has some special power to wallop you by forcing your own imagination to fill in the blanks. Having seen the long lingering scenes of the movie spoiled some of that power of the story for me. Still, it was wonderful to experience the narrative version of some of the more powerful points of the tale (the first embraces, the mad kiss on reuniting years later in the eyesight of Ennis’ wife, and the poignant scene at the end when Ennis visits Jack’s boyhood room). It really seems that the world was waiting for this account of gay men out of synch with the manly world of the West, and it seems quite an achievement for a woman to pull off with such power and economy

The other story that moved me the most was the one about the bull-rider, Diamond Felts in “The Mud Below”. I could identify with the allure of rodeo glory from the dreams of my fellow students where I grew up in a tiny town in Oklahoma, where the only other prospect seemed to be working in an oil refinery. Proulx makes you empathize with Diamond’s pitiful home life and his attraction to the drug of success at rodeo riding. As the seedy parts of that life begin to take hold, empathy turns to pity, and then, wham, his treatment of women reveals the tip of the iceberg in the form of the monster in his heart. It makes me want to sing: “Mama, don’t let your babies grow up to be cowboys. Let them be doctors and lawyers and such”:

He almost always has a girl in the motel bed with him when he could afford a motel, a half-hour painkiller but without the rush and thrill he got from a bullride. There was no sweet time when it was over. He wanted them to get gone. …
There was no one in his life to slow him down with love. Sometimes riding the bull was the least part of it, but only the turbulent ride gave him the indescribable rush, shot him with mainline with crazy-ass elation. In the arena everything was real because none of it was real except the chance to get dead.

The big draw for me with this book is not in the quirky plots but Proulx’s writing style, which other people either love or hate. If you want to get a real earful from the latter camp, check out B.R. Myers’  A Reader's Manifesto: An attack on the growing pretentiousness of American literary prose . He is not happy with how she will unroll a clashing nest of metaphors like a machine gun (to use a metaphor). I find the technique exhilarating, somewhat like the energy that burst forth at a poetry slam. Judge for yourself:

"The Half-Skinned Steer" (which first appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, in November of 1997), starts with this sentence: ‘In the long unfurling of his life, from tight-wound kid hustler in a wool suit riding the train out of Cheyenne to geriatric limper in this spooled-out year, Mero had kicked down thoughts of the place where he began, a so-called ranch on strange ground at the south hinge of the Big Horns.’ Like so much modern prose, this demands to be read quickly, with just enough attention to register the bold use of words. Slow down, and things fall apart. Proulx seems to have intended a unified conceit, but unfurling, or spreading out, as of a flag or an umbrella, clashes disastrously with the images of thread that follow. (Maybe "unraveling" didn't sound fancy enough.) A life is unfurled, a hustler is wound tight, a year is spooled out, and still the metaphors continue, with kicked down—which might work in less crowded surroundings, though I doubt it—and hinge, which is cute if you've never seen a hinge or a map of the Big Horns. And this is just the first sentence!

At the bottom of his carping is an argument that her efforts at style interfere with immersion in the story:
… after a while the reader stops trying to think about what the metaphors mean. Maybe this is the effect that Proulx is aiming for; she seems to want to keep us on the surface of the text at all times, as if she were afraid that we might forget her quirky narratorial presence for even a line or two.

My objection to this is that her wordplay for me doesn’t call attention to the writer’s presence any more than a jazz riff interferes with hearing the music instead of imagining the composer. By analogy, you could say Picasso was a stylist with a lot of focus on surface forms, but that doesn’t interfere with the narrative impact in the case of the civilian bombing in his “Guernica.” To use another metaphor, the beginning sentence quoted above seems to me like dancing with abandon out on thin ice before letting the reader sink through into the story. Works for me.

This book made me a woman and then made me a man, and then made me feel like I was on the receiving end of an angry fist at a bar fight but also that I still had punches to throw myself. Violence + passion.

I don’t know what to say besides I miss camping and trekking a lot right now. I want to walk barefoot in the snow.
Or at least wake up in the cold, dry mountain air and smell a fire or the wet shade of a pine forest. I want to get in my car and drive all night all freakin night until the dawn happens somewhere far from here and I have to grab my hat from the wind. Somewhere you can feel ~the land~ and ~the wind~ and where there’s a creaky old attic, some dusty western place where coffee is made in blue ceramics that have turned black from use. I miss the sky in Texas. It’s different idc what they say.

The suffering and loneliness contained within these stories is a powerful brew...the barren and exposed humanity is not to be taken likely, but it is worth it.