Annie Proulx - Close Range

Review by Alison Crane on show August 2009
‘Close Range’ is a selection of short stories set in Proulx’s home state of Wyoming, a state, according to one of these stories, where there’s a ‘bleed-out of brains and talent, a place for common people with no jobs and a tough life in a trailer house.’
And it’s true that the people in these stories lead difficult and despairing lives: cattlemen, rodeo riders, ranchers, farming equipment salesmen - all trying to get by in a seemingly indifferent world.
These stories feel like the real deal: real lives lived in a real landscape. Annie Proulx’s description of both the expansive Wyoming landscape and the people who populate it is breathtaking. The landscape is described thus; ‘You stand there, braced. Cloud shadows race over the buff rock stacks as a projected film, casting a queasy, mottled ground rash. The air hisses and it is no local breeze but the great harsh sweep of wind from the turning of the earth.’ And here Proulx describes a man’s attraction for a woman ‘It was her voice that drew you in, that low, twangy voice, wouldn’t matter if she was saying the alphabet , what you heard was the rustle of hay. She could make you smell the smoke from an unlit fire.’

‘The Mud Below’ is a story of a wannabe rodeo star, who only comes alive on the back of a bull. He describes the buzz of rodeoing as ‘dark lightening in his gut, a feeling of blazing real existence.’ Despite his early success in the ring, he ends his days with his face a ‘mass or surgical despair.’

In ’55 Miles to the Gas Pump’, a wife discovers the bodies of missing women in her deceased husband’s secret attic. Her comment? ‘When you live a long way out, you make your own fun.’

But this collection is most famous for the inclusion of ‘Brokeback Mountain’, a story of two ‘country boys, brought up, according to Proulx, to hard work and privation, both rough mannered and tough spoken, who fall hopelessly and unexpectedly in love. The story of their thwarted and complex relationship is painfully sad and it is to Proulx’s credit that she manages to conjure up in such a short space of time what other authors fail to achieve in a novel: characters who you believe exist entirely, life stories which can break your heart with their mixture of extraordinariness and ordinariness. The essence for me of Proulx’s stories, aside from the wonderful language use, is she recognizes that our lives as humans engage us fully and yet are played against a backdrop of a world which has seen it all before and will keep on turning, with or without the human dramas played out on its landscape.

As she writes, ‘Other cultures have camped here a while and disappeared. Only earth and sky matter…… Nothing delays the flood of morning light.’