None of the characters in this collection has an easy time of it. Nearly all come from poor and/or broken homes. Many left home too young for them to have had much of a chance. With few exceptions, these characters have unusual, distinctive names. No matter their names, they seem real enough.

The prose of Annie Proulx that I loved in The Shipping News and Postcards was best displayed in the last story of this collection Brokeback Mountain. It flowed more easily, and it was clear that she felt for these two men: Ennis, who could barely accept who he was, and Jack, who so desperately needed Ennis. I have not - and will not - see the film. I don't know what they might have done to this story, but probably came close to ruining it.

I liked The Mud Below about a young man who chooses to become a rodeo bull rider. Rodeo night in a hot little Okie town and Diamond Felts was inside a metal chute a long way from the scratch on Wyoming dirt he named as home, sitting on the back of bull 82N, a loose-skinned brindle Brahma-cross identified in the program as Little Kisses. I'm sure there are lifestyles more difficult than a bull rider on the circuit, but most of us don't know about them.

One of the darkest stories is People in Hell Just Want a Drink of Water. A woman doesn't get much of a life out in the middle of nowhere Wyoming. She might see her chance to walk away from a man and leave him to raise the nine boys she bore him. But what happens to those children? At barely two pages, the shortest story is 55 Miles to the Gas Pump. Proulx might have intended more humor in the stories than I got. 55 Miles may be the darkest humor I've ever encountered and yet it was definitely there.

As with any collection, there is bound to be a story that just missed the mark for the reader and there were those, too. All in all this is a good collection and I'm happy to give it 4-stars. Only for those 2-3 misses does it fall short of the 5-star mark.

What am I to make of this collection of stories of people enduring a harsh, unforgiving landscape, hopeless lives with bleak futures, banally cruel family relationships, and little, very little spark of insight or growth? The spare writing with its staccato rhythms added to the sense of despair, the feel that the stories were pounding away at me much as life was pounding away at the characters. There are outstanding turns of phrase in these stories; the writing is technically superb. But reading it left me depressed and exhausted. I felt as if I was in one of Dante’s upper levels of Hell, with no hope of ever seeing Paradise. 4 stars for the writing and 2 stars for the

A book like this causes its reader to thank God, unironically and humbly, for allowing her to come across it.

A few lucky accidents brought Close Range into my hands. First, we caught the last half of a very edited-for-tv Brokeback Mountain, flipping channels after a long, hot mid-Atlantic day. When I got back to Los Angeles, I mentioned to my sister that I wanted to read Brokeback Mountain, the story. She had to return some books anyway, so the next evening the book was in my hands, as if it had willed itself there. I certainly hadn’t put in much effort.

I was working on my final story for English 124: Short Story Writing at L.A. City College. My chief disappointment with the class was that we never actually discussed the short story. Our topic was plot and all the teaching examples were drawn from films. We were assigned didactic online articles about how over 90% of high grossing films involve some kind of plot reversal. Ironically, despite my beef with this approach and my constant bitching that we should look to stories themselves to show us how to write stories, Brokeback Mountain the film brought me to this book more than anything else.

But once I opened Close Range, Proulx demonstrated what this genre can do. How to sketch characters and settings in a very compressed space. The autotelic pleasure of beautiful sentences and local dialogue. How to open up a whole backstory with a terse flash.

In fact, finishing this collection, one is left with the sense that the genre’s pleasures and capabilities have been thoroughly mined. As if methodically, no stone left unturned: Close Range includes a character study, a voice-driven “I” narrative, a suspenseful quest, a folk-tale, a love story. It was prodigious indeed that I happened upon this book, because I can’t imagine a better short-story writing text.

These stories are full of fury and spitfire, fueled by Proulx’s athletic prose. She can go for paragraphs at a time without an uninventive adjective, without a plain descriptive sentence. Just as one’s attention comes to her prodigy, she showers you with a prodigious display. Then at other times, Proulx advances a narrative using only plain and sparing language. Like the Wyoming weather, her prose can blend into the landscape one moment, and the next moment step into center stage, rising like a furious deity with a will of its own.

Consider, for example, this relentless sequence of verbs from an opening paragraph in “Pair A Spurs” (emphasis mine):

"
Ten days before June a blizzard caromed over the plains, drifting house-high on lee slopes, dragging a train of arctic air that froze the wet snow, encased new calves in icy shells. For a week the cold held under glassy sky, snow-scald burning the cows udders; it broke in minutes under a chinook’s hot breath. Meltwater streamed over the frozen ground. The bodies of dead stock emerged from fading drifts, now you don’t, now you see em, a painful counting game for ranchers flying over in single-engines. Scrope’s yard flooded, a mile of highway disappeared under a foot of water while they held his mail at the post office, but before it ebbed another storm staggered in from the west and shucked out six inches of pea hail, a roaring burst that metamorphosed into a downpour, switched back to hail and finally made a foot of coarse-grained snow. Two days later the first tornado of the season unscrewed a few grain elevators from the ground. (152)
"

What I love about this passage is how the orgasmic ending of the penultimate sentence renders the plainest verb here, “made,” profound.

More examples of Proulx’s relentlessness abound. For ranching vocabulary, on the first page of “The Blood Bay” we have “gant bodies of cattle,” draws (a gully shallower than a ravine, in case you didn’t know), coulees, and whetstone. For metaphors, the opening page of “People in Hell Just Want a Drink of Water” gives us: “Cloud shadows race over the buff rock stacks as a projected film,” and “It is like a deep note that cannot be heard but is felt, it is like a claw in the gut.”

And then there's what she doesn't say: how she leaves the intricacies of geography, guns, or tractors unexplained, or how she carefully controls how plot and backstory are revealed, so that the chronology of the story and the chronology of the reader's discovery are quite different.

Close Range was a National Bestseller when it was published in 1999, after several stories in it won O. Henry’s, after several more were chosen for Best American Short Stories 1998 and 1999 and after one was published in Best American Short Stories of the Century. After its publication, literary accolades continued to rain, but Brokeback Mountain failed to win the award for Best Picture and Proulx was mercilessly lambasted by B.R. Myers in his now-famous ”Reader’s Manifesto.” (It delighted me to read him quoting lines I loved, and then talking shit about them.) Proulx, Close Range, and Brokeback sit at a strange nexus: loved by the literary establishment, respectfully received, with various reservations and qualifiers, by the mass media; and scorned by sharp old boys like Myers. Thus, Close Range is a productive site indeed from which to ask questions about what ‘literariness’ means, and what art can or should do in its various arenas.

All this makes me feel especially grateful that I came upon these stories so innocently, and read them without regard for their position in such debates. (But, if you care to know, I agree with Proulx. (Please click that link, it is pure awesome, except for some LA shit-talking). I think Brokeback Mountain a much, much better movie than Crash, which offended me with its mischaracterization of race relations in LA. As a child of happy Angeleno miscegenation, I must object. When I watched the movie, I began to do so immediately and vocally right after the credits stopped rolling. Thinking on it now, the two movies represent the dichotomy between plot-driven, surprise-ending, message-conveying stories that close with, well, closure, and plodding, ambiguous, language-driven, landscape-driven work. Being rough here, the Motion Picture Academy lives by the former, the literary establishment by the latter, and Myers by the former, at least I think so. He may exceed this dichotomy. If forced to choose, I endorse the latter.)

Before I thought about the Oscars or read Myers, though, context was one of my main interests in Close Range. What context does Close Range claim for itself?

These stories disregard both time and current events. To a reader ignorant of ranches and rodeos, the technology that appears in Close Range will appear dated and quaint, as will its dialects. Fashion, for these characters, involves spurs, boots, and flannel shirts. Transportation consists of old trucks and trailers. Nothing is new. Everything needs fixing. Occasionally someone listens to the radio or remarks upon the caprices of the beef market. Nobody ever watches tv. It comes as a shock, then, when one comes across the occasional reminder that these people live in eras as recent as the 1990s. Inklings of their urban contemporaries come at them antagonistically.

...read the rest here. It was too long to fit in the space allocated by goodreads.
http://meekadjustments.blogspot.com/2...

The short story "Brokeback Mountain" is a definite five star, however, the other stories did not have the same impact for me.

i’m sobbing here over the last short story but the rest were GARBAGE

I loved this, and I'm not a short story lover usually. Brokeback Mountain drew me in but actually there's something in every story, and they're sad and funny and beautifully written.

Not all of the stories in here are good, but all of them are evocative, authentic, and depressing. I think sometimes Annie Proulx’s writing shifts between artful and pretentious, but it is always truly masculine, for better and for worse. I found that the shorter her stories were, the more I liked them (with one exception in Brokeback Mountain). Overall I thought this was a good collection of stories, and although not all of them appealed to me, I enjoyed it.

There is so much dystopian-future fiction out there; in Close Range Annie Proulx gives us some good dystopian-past-and-present balance. Apparently, in his youth my father was kind of taken with Wyoming and tried to talk my mom into moving there. Whenever I pass through the state a little prayer of thanksgiving escapes my lips that we escaped that particular event horizon. Not that I have anything against the fine state of Wyoming! But I wouldn't want to live there. Close Range didn't do a darn thing to change that.

Depressing and harsh.

È più facile di quanto credi cedere all'impulso di autodistruggersi.

Non era vero quello che dicevano del dolore ed il tempo. Ti scavava dentro in eterno, e continuava ad aprire nuove voragini anche quando eri diventato come un setaccio.

Restava uno spazio vuoto tra ciò che sapeva e ciò che voleva credere, ma non ci poteva fare niente, e se non la puoi risolvere devi prenderla com'è.

Una raccolta cruda e dura, con nessun barlume di luce o speranza.
Una serie di personaggi marchiati a fuoco fin dall'inizio, dannati e senza possibilità di salvezza.
Cowboys e donne del Wyoming che lottano per la loro sopravvivenza o anche solo per qualche briciolo di felicità in una terra immensa e desolata.
Non ho amato tutti i racconti in egual maniera, ma è stato un crescendo.
La raccolta si conclude con il bellissimo "Gente del Wyoming" (Brokeback Mountain per gli amanti del cinema).
Avrei potuto dare anche 4 stelle ma i diversi errori di stampa dell'edizione Baldini& Castoldi mi hanno fatto un po' storcere il naso.

I absolutely love E. Annie Proulx. She does that thing with words that makes me go all dissociated from the world around me and live inside the world she creates. I am almost always disturbed by her stories but I can't stop reading them. In fact, her writing is so good that when I saw "Brokeback Mountain" (which I saw *before* I read her short fic on which it was based), I didn't think it was a great story... until I read her actual story. There is ONE line in her piece that makes the story GREAT which was impossible to convey in pictures. IMHO that is what makes a great writer. It's not just what they say, but the exact way in which they say it which makes the art.

I love E. Annie Proulx so much, in fact, that for years I didn't notice the "E." at the beginning of her name... and by the time I noticed, I didn't care.

I sent a copy of this book to my 87 year old Great Aunt Georgene Conley, the cowboy poetess who lives in Belle Fourche, South Dakota. She wrote back that she loved the book, as did many of her friends who she passed it along to. If a bunch of mid-western cowboy poets can read a gay love story and love it, you know it has to be good writing.

“'This is a miserable place,’ she said. ‘My god it’s miserable.’”

I’m sorry, Wyoming, but nothing I read here convinced me otherwise. I had some hope when I started that Annie Proulx could show me something beautiful about this part of the country. But there was a lot of ugly in these stories.

I lived in a small western town, and so much of this was familiar. You have to admire the strength and the sheer scrappiness of ranchers, but even the time I spent reading these stories was too long to spend with them. Only the excellent writing could keep me reading.

“It was all a hard, fast ride that ended in the mud.”

Brokeback Mountain was by far my favorite, and for me, had the most beauty. Job History shows in just a few pages what small-town life can be like. People in Hell Just Want a Drink of Water might be the best title ever, and is a completely devastating read. The Governors of Wyoming … well, I’ll just leave you with this quote:

"Here’s Doc Osborne, first Democratic Governor. A lynch mob hung Big Nose George Parrott back in the 1870’s. Doc got the body, skinned it, tanned the hide, made himself a medical bag and a pair of shoes. Wore the shoes to his inauguration. They don’ t make democrats like that anymore.”