Close Range : Wyoming Stories
by Annie Proulx

List Price: $15.00
Our Price: $3.87
You Save: $11.13 (74%)
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Buy Used: from $0.01 (click here)
Category: Book
See more book details and other editions

Book Summary Information

Book Reviews of Close Range : Wyoming Stories

Book Review: Stories Destined to Stand the Test of Time
Summary: 5 Stars

The names of the characters who people these stories suggests their grim and stinted existence: Hulse Birch, Wauneta Hipsag, Shy Hamp, Noyce Hair, Sutton Muddyman, Car Scrope, Pake Bitts, Horm Timsley. They are characters who lead desperate lives as rodeo riders, cowboys, sheep farmers, and poor ranchers. As one reviewer has suggested, "[n]o one is successful here except the bar owners, the dude ranchers and the cattle traders, and they are always just offstage, counting their money." Shattering all romantic illusions of the West, Proulx paints a relentlessly bleak picture of characters who cannot escape their past, who are often driven by the basest of instincts, and whose hardscrabble existence is continually overwhelmed by exigencies of geography, climate and landscape.

It is a claustrophobic and atrophied world, a world where possibilities have narrowed to nothing. As a character in "A Lonely Coast" disquietly relates while sitting at the Golden Buckle bar, "[t]here were times when I thought the Buckle was the best place in the world, but it could shift on you and then the whole dump seemed a mess of twist-faced losers, the women with eyebrows like crowbars, the men covered with bristly red hair, knuckles the size of new potatoes, showing the gene pool was small and the rivulets that had once fed it had dried up."

When a character does try to escape his past, he invariably meets with a bitter end. Thus, in the story "People in Hell Just Want a Drink of Water", Ras Tinsley, a boy who "was smart with numbers, read books [and] asked complicated questions no one could answer," leaves Wyoming at the age of sixteen to see the world. Gone more than five years, his parents finally hear that he has been severely injured in an auto accident. Arriving back home by train, thanks to the courtesy of a Methodist minister, his parents can barely recognize him. "He was a monster. The left side of his face and head had been damaged and torn, had healed in a mass of crimson scars. There was a whistling hole in his throat and a scarred left eye socket. His jaw was deformed." But that is not the end of Ras Tinsley's misery. He rides the range, exposing himself to women and young girls, until neighboring ranchers deal with him in a grim and sadistic way. Similarly, in "The Half-Skinned Steer", a story selected by John Updike for inclusion in "The Best American Short Stories of the Century", Mero Corn, an "octogenarian vegetarian" (or "a cattleman gone wrong") who had left his Wyoming home more than sixty years earlier, meets a darkly mystical end while returing for his brother's funeral.

Proulx captures the grim, gritty reality of rodeo life in "The Mud Below", one of the best stories in this collection. Its hard bitten, bull riding protagonist, Diamond Felts, remembering back to a day when he watched a ranch hand gelding calves, grimly reflects that, "[t]he course of life's events seemed slower than the knife but not less thorough."

Proulx's densely evocative prose strkingly captures, as well, the paralyzing loneliness of her characters. In "The Bunchgrass Edge of the World" Ottaline Touhey, a lonely, spinsterish girl "distinguished by a physique approaching the size of a hundred-gallon propane tank," finds herself communing with an old green tractor, a tractor that speaks to her in a voice "hoarse and plangent, just above an injured whisper, a movie gangster's voice." The tractor, seeminly protective of her, confesses to killing a ranch hand in a rollover accident many years earlier, a ranch hand who had unseemly desires for the then four-year-old Ottaline. The story, like the others in this book, ultimately ends with a clever little twist of fate involving the tractor.

More than anything, however, "Open Range: Wyoming Stories" brilliantly draws relationships between its characters and the land, using nature as a touchstone for the plots to follow. Thus, in "Pair a Spurs", Car Scrope, who had lived on the Coffeepot Ranch for the entire forty years of his life, had developed a "morbid passion for the ranch as a child when he believed he could hear the grass mocking him." Remembering his older brother's apparent suicide, something which his parents never talked to him about, Scrope remembers the grass hissing, "best one lost, worst one stays." In "Brokeback Mountain", perhaps the finest story in this remarkable collection, two young cowboys develop a passionate, life-long and, ultimately destructive, relationship while herding sheep in the mountains one summer. Foreshadowing the story to come, Proulx describes them descending the mountain with vivid imagery: "The mountain boiled with demonic energy, glazed with flickering broken-cloud light, the wind combed the grass and drew from the damaged krummholz and slit rock a bestial drone. As they descended the slope Ennis felt he was in slow motion, but headlong, irreversible fall."

Reading "Open Range: Wyoming Stories" is like gorging yourself on a dark chocolate cake. The writing is richly layered, the author deeply in touch with her characters and her place. It is fiction brilliantly written, stories destined to stand the test of time.

Summary of Close Range : Wyoming Stories

Annie Proulx's masterful language and fierce love of Wyoming are evident in these breathtaking tales of loneliness, quick violence, and the wrong kinds of love. Each of the stunning portraits in Close Range reveals characters fiercely wrought with precision and grace.

These are stories of desperation and unlikely elation, set in a landscape both stark and magnificent -- by an author writing at the peak of her craft.

Short Stories Books

• Books > Subjects > Literature & Fiction