Book Review: Fine Just The Way It Is, Wyoming Stories 3 (IHT)

Fine Just The Way It Is
Wyoming Stories 3.
By Annie Proulx.
221 pages. $25, Scribner; £8.99, Fourth Estate .
In Annie Proulx's new story collection, a young rancher about to build a cabin on his claim in the late-19th-century Wyoming wilderness walks the perimeter of his 80 acres singing old cowboy songs. This ritual marking of his place takes him all day, and in the dusk he returns, his voice a raspy whisper. The careful observation of such a ceremony would seem to suggest that time might shed its blessings on the rancher and his wife, that they might enjoy peace and ease here and the grace of days.
Who are we kidding? This is Annie Proulx, a writer who staked her claim around the spectacular rectangle of Wyoming by marking its "metes and bounds" with "Close Range," took insurance on it with "Bad Dirt" and now appears with "Fine Just the Way It Is," a third collection of Wyoming stories, just to make sure. The title could be paraphrased "Even if it's broken, don't fix it." "Close Range" is a remarkable book, lyric and gritty, and it contains "Brokeback Mountain," a breathtaking love story. But each of these collections bears Proulx's brand of hard drama, hard irony, hard weather, and hard and soft characters blown about and many times destroyed by the powerful mix. Her sense of story is admirable, her sentences are artful, and she writes like a demon. She has nicely disrupted the mythology of the Old West. All but one of the stories in "Fine Just the Way It Is" range from the 19th century to the modern day and offer a world in which the natural elements are murderous and folks aren't much better. Right after Archie, the fresh young landowner in "Them Old Cowboy Songs," sings the property line, Proulx throws in an uncharacteristically sunny aside: "There is no happiness like that of a young couple in a little house they have built themselves in a place of beauty and solitude." From time to time, you glimpse an Eden in Proulx's world, and when you see it, you'd better take a photograph, because it won't last long. More often her narratives are richly and bleakly Dickensian, right down to the names. In just one story, she gives us Chay Sump, Lightning Willy, Bible Bob, Bunk Peck, Rufus Clatter (a politician), the mother and stepdaughter Flora and Queeda Dorgan, Sink Gartrell, Wally Finch, John Tank and the libidinous voyeur and telegraph operator Harp Daft.
We're used to seeing the people in Proulx's stories deep in their hard-scrabble lives, eking out their survival in company that often turns out to be wildly insalubrious. Archie, the young rancher, goes wrangling cattle to save some money, but the weather - which has always been a real thing in Annie Proulx's writing and not some symbolic touch brought in like a soundtrack - gets hold of him. Between a double dose of winter and a bad decision, his fate is iced up. But what happens to his wife is unspeakably worse, and Proulx doesn't spare us a beat of it, from her first labor pangs to the rest. Proulx puts legs under the old saw about the frontier being tough on women, making them carry the hard weight. With her Adam and Eve expelled and destroyed, she ends the story from the perspective of a neighboring prospector. "There was no way," he concludes, "to know what had happened." Proulx won't traffic in euphemism unless it cuts with the blade of irony. In a story nicely titled "The Great Divide," another couple, Hi and Helen Alcorn, also look for their dream house, this time in a treeless homestead settlement. Yet all their post-World War I American optimism can't win the West. Their decision is the good news and the bad news at once: "They would make their own frontier." This attempt takes various forms. At one point, Hi desecrates an Indian burial cave while fashioning a crude still to make potato whiskey. There's the metaphor right there - and symbols like these appear again and again, both in Proulx's stories and in the history of the American West. Later, Hi throws in with his brother-in-law, Fenk Fipps, and Fenk's sidekick, Wacky Lipe, chasing wild horses. Fatally kicked, Hi jokes all the way to town.
The deepest grief in the collection is borne by Dakotah Lister, who returns from Iraq injured and bereft. Raised by a feckless "trash rancher" and her resentful grandmother, Dakotah experiences her life as a relentless series of miscommunications and harm. Each rite is accompanied by embarrassment, mistake and mayhem. This kind of story could become brittle in a moment, could snap in half and sink, but Proulx buoys it with one stellar insight when Dakotah returns from serving in "Eye-rack." On the drive home: "She realized that every ranch she passed had lost a boy, lost them early and late. . . . This was the waiting darkness that surrounded ranch boys, the dangerous growing up that canceled their favored status. The trip along this road was a roll call of grief."
In two other tales, Proulx has a little fun featuring Satan at work remodeling his domain, but better than these is her honest-to-pete tall tale about "The Sagebrush Kid." The title character isn't a boy; it's a gravy-and-blood-fed plant that, according to legend, is still a voracious menace to this day, offering unwary pilgrims shelter from the sun. In Proulx country, it's even dangerous to park in the shade.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/09/05/news/bks6.php?page=2




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