Customer Reviews

Close Range : Wyoming Stories

5 star:		(90)
4 star:		(32)
3 star:		(19)
2 star:		(11)
1 star:		(13)

 

 

I am a grown-up, middle aged man not drawn much to sentimentality. I am not a practiced reader of fiction and I have spent only one night in Wyoming. I just finished reading the final story in the collection, "Brokeback Mountain",about ten minutes ago.

I still have tears in my eyes. It seems to me that I am falling out of a dream into the wet and chill February morning by San Francisco Bay where I now live. But the dream was of a place utterly familiar. I mean, emotionally familiar, familiar in memory, and evidently, familiar to my body. I can still feel the tingling just behind my cheekbones and the low-voltage electric discomfort in my chest. I guess Annie Proulx touched something in the geography of my own soul with her story. And even in the sadness that swirls around my eyes, I am grateful to her for that. And amazed that this woman could write so tellingly of men's hearts.

I said that I am a middle-aged man. So I have a history behind me. That's part of what makes you middle-aged. When you're young, who you want to be someday is the largest part of who you are. When you're middle-aged, the evidence begins to mount. The past is what it was and that is the largest part of who you are. It's harder to make believe anymore. And the story includes loss, confusion, missed opportunities, cowardice, fear, and memories of your own Brokeback Mountain. And sometimes the only redemption for the past, if it is redemption, is to remember it, fully. That's all.

Now that I am back in the waking world a bit more, I also want to say how beautifully Annie Proulx weaves the English language, with the kind of strength, color and contrapuntal roughness that makes it so earthy and satisfying. There were a few passages that I read out loud, just for the rhythm, the accents, the tumbled spring-thaw rush of sound. In a story about people not noted either for reflective insight or poetic diction, she has, paradoxically, by her own re-membering of them, let them be themselves, without apology, and yet re-situated them in a place of human grandeur.

I guess Aristotle had a point when he wrote about poetry as a moment of katharsis, of the compelling power of pity and fear. I bet he never thought he could find it on Brokeback Mountain.

--but the rest of the collection is powerful, too. If you haven't read Proulx, pick this one up. It's rough, raw, brutally honest storytelling.

But honestly, I can't explain what it is about Brokeback Mountain that makes me pull the book off the shelf at least twice a year since it came out five years ago. It's got to be one of the most intensely moving stories I've ever read in my life.

Those men, their lives. The scattered, fragile moments where they do connect, like that scene on the front porch when they haven't seen each other in four years or that moment where he finds the flannel shirts. Kick me in the gut while you grab my heart and rip it to shreds. You'll love it, I promise.

I'm sure that some people unfamiliar with Proulx's work or this story will permit the film adaptation to become another banal symbol of those crazy gays taking over EVERYTHING--and deny themselves the pleasure of reading good, solid American fiction.

Regardless, do yourself a huge favor: read this story before seeing the film (fingers crossed).

The first time I picked up Close Range: Wyoming Stories.
I thought MMm...Just another collection of boring stories about
white rural hicks. I've read stuff like this before. Usually set in the South. With the typical set of colorful charicters.
From the pompous upper crust to reddest of rednecks.
But I started reading. And kept on reading, for nine hours
strait!
I couldn't put it down. Annie Proulx is one powerful writer!
She made me rethink my attitudes about how rural folk lived.
Their lives are just as complex, mixed up and sad as us city dwellers are.
I chuckled at the first two or three stories. Felt empathy for
fourth. but it was the last story, Brokeback Mountain. That
one tore my heart out.
I ached for the charicters of Ennis and Jack. They lived in a
time that had no kind words for what were or how they felt about
each other. If they had lived 3000 years earlier or just 40 years later they could've been very happy together. But spending all those years apart. Only seeing each other maybe one or if they were lucky twice a year. Just made what they had even more bitter sweet. The ending had me in tears for three days, And I'm not the emotional type!
I've just ordered the audio version. and can't wait to
hear this wonderful book set to the spoken word.
Please, Please buy this book!

I grew up a cowboy, working on my granddaddy's ranch in Western Wyoming, and reading "Close Range" reminded me of all the reasons I chose to leave Wyoming, and all the reasons I wish I were back there.

Life back home was a big stew of frostbite and mud, blood, snot, booze, and just a pinch of hope that tomorrow might be better. This book has the recipe down pat.

Just one cowboy's opinion- read this book.

Well, it amuses me to see all of these reviews by people from the East Coast and Midwest and California telling us here in Wyoming how much this "is" Wyoming or "isn't" Wyoming. It's an entertaining book, it flirts with, and occasionally hits the truth right on the nail head, and it's not the entire picture of Wyoming either. The stories all contain elements of Wyoming, both what it was, and what it still is, but they tend to run towards the dark side, the brutal side, the barren side, both of Wyoming's climate and geography, and of its people. I'm not one of Wyoming's few city dwellers - I live and work with cattle and wildlife every day, I'm out there on the -30 degree days, I see some ugly things and some incredibly beautiful things, and I think that's what resonated with me about this book. I saw my friends and neighbors and enemies in this book, and that's what kept me turning pages. I wish I'd seen a little more of the splendor, the hope, the grace, and the wonder of Wyoming, but what the heck, I didn't write it. Quite a good bit of Wyoming marches to its own drummer, and you can drive miles and miles on most of our roads without seeing other folks, and we like things that way. Enjoy the book or don't, but don't gripe about the kernels of truth in it or your perceived notions about how it's wrong or right about Wyoming from your highrise condo in some eastern city. It's close enough for us born and raised here.

Of all the author's working today I think that Annie Proulx has, hands down, the best descriptive style. She can instantly set a mood or a tone with just a few choice words, and draws you into the world of Wyoming so fully that you begin to feel like you've actually experienced it before (assuming, of course, that you haven't in real life). The hardships of ranch life and the loneliness (and sometimes aching futility)of each character makes 'Close Range' a fast and very compelling read. From the opening lines of "The Half-Skinned Steer" to the close of "Brokeback Mountain", 'Close Range' is a solid page turner. Small wonder that John Updike included "The Half-Skinned Steer" in 'The Best American Short Stories of the Century', and "Brokeback Mountain" has now been turned into a movie. And how heartfelt each story is! Each story provokes a deep emotional response, and "Brokeback Mountain" is a beautiful, though heartbreaking, cap to the collection. Proulx's total mastery of the short story form makes for an enjoyable, highly reccomendable read.

Annie Proulx has a boundless imagination and a talent for writing that leaves the reader reeling. Her characters are so immediately real that when a story ends, you are invariably left wondering, "Well, what next for this guy?"

The names are terrific. Proulx has a soft spot for the wacko character name--Diamond Felts, Ennis del Marr, Roany Hamp, Pake Bitts--but because the stories are so vividly rendered, the names stand up to the tales in which they appear.

Western stories all, this collection stands out with the now-famous "Brokeback Mountain"--a shortish story that covers 20 years and which reverberates in your mind for days after you read it. Another terrific one is "The Mud Below," about a teenager who discovers how good he is at rodeo-riding and how it comes to define and consume his life.

The dialogue is short and abrupt, the plot turns are sometimes brutal, all of which suits the atmospheric yet realistic west Annie Proulx evokes in this terrific book. HIGHLY recommended.

For those who've read the author's other books, including "The Shipping News", her style will not seem unfamiliar; she writes hard, clipped sentences (sometimes just phrases) that individually slice like cleavers, but together - in the paragraph and on a page - deliver wonderful, biting descriptions of the feelings and experiences of her characters. It may take some a few pages to get used to this style, but the effort is well worth it; Proulx is one of the sharpest novelists around.

Her short stories are somewhat less successful, but no less intriguing. She herself has admitted, in interviews, that she has felt that the short form was not her strong suit, and that she wrote many of these stories as a way of challenging herself. While she may not be classified as a master of the genre, she does a fine job of it. These stories are interesting, well-written in general, and intriguing. She can get to the core of a character's emotion and experience, making the familiar seem special, and the special seem normal.

Sure, as some - especially a few from the great state in the West - have written previously, not all of the citizens of Wyoming are like her characters. But that's no reason not to read and enjoy this book. What work of FICTION is completely realistic? Ms. Proulx is writing her vision; we should read it that way and enjoy. HINT: The best way to read this book is on a cold, snowy, "thank-god-I'm-not-out-there" kind of day. Take a pause between stories; don't read it cover-to-cover. That will flatten out some of the unevenness, and make the pleasure last longer.

Of the stories in this collection, the upcoming movie has spotlighted the story "Brokeback Mountain." And make no mistake, it's a superior story in an excellent collection. The emotional hook to Brokeback is definitely compelling and will stick with you for a very long time.

I would avoid the stand-alone copy, however, and purchase it as part of this collection, since it includes my favorite story, "The Half-Skinned Steer." From the first paragraph, this story pulled me in, and didn't let go as Mero and the reader get closer and closer to Wyoming. Mero's story converges with the gruesome tale of Tin Head and the steer in a final scene that continues to crop up in some of my weirder dreams.

Other notable stories for me were "The Mud Below," a compelling look at a town kid who becomes a rodeo rider, and the surreal "The Bunchgrass Edge of the World," with Ottaline and her evil talking tractor.

This is the first book I've read by Annie Proulx. I picked it up because I read a favorable review of Bad Dirt: Wyoming Stories 2, and thought I ought to start with the first collection.

The stories are slices of life of all sorts of people who live mainly in solitude in Wyoming and include some darkly funny tall tales among the more realistic-seeming ones.

I've never lived in Wyoming, although I now live close to it. I know only a couple of people who live there, and they don't really seem to fit the profile of any of the hard-luck, hard-bitten characters in these stories. However, I have driven the dirty, dusty, nameless dirt-and-gravel roads that criss-cross the lonely state. I have seen the landscape, from the endless dry high plains to the majesty of the Medicine Bow and Teton Mountains to the downright bizarreness of Yellowstone Park. As I've bumped along these roads, I've seen lonely outposts -- ranches, shacks, trailers, lean-tos, resort homes -- and have wondered what sort of person tries to scratch out a living in such dusty loneliness. The stories in this book are ones I would have made up driving by those outposts if I were only a little more clever. The characters are drawn simply but sharply by Ms. Proulx's amazing gift of metaphor. This gift extends to her description of the real star of all the stories -- the land. While I may not know Wyoming folks well, I know enough about their land to know that the descriptions of it in this book are spot-on and beautiful.

I recommend this book highly (but maybe not to those with very weak stomachs), and I'm really looking forward to reading more of Ms. Proulx's work.