Fine Just the Way It Is: Wyoming Stories 3 (Hardcover)

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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. The steely Proulx (The Shipping News, etc.) returns with another astonishing series of hardscrabble lives lived in the sparse, inhospitable West, where one mistake can put you on a long-winding trail to disaster. Family Man is set in the Mellowhorn Home for old cowboys and aging ranch widows, where resident curmudgeon Ray Forkenbrock shares memories of his father with his granddaughter and an eavesdropping caretaker; the secret he reveals gives new meaning to the word relative. In two demonically clever riffs on human weakness, I've Always Loved This Place and Swamp Mischief, the Devil, accompanied by his secretary, Duane Fork, must entertain himself thinking up new ways to bother the living and the dead, as temptation is no longer a necessary evil. Saving the best for last, Tits-up in a Ditch breaks new literary ground with the gut-wrenching tale of an Iraq veteran who returns to her family raw with grief. Pioneer homesteaders facing drought and debt give way to modern-day hippies trying to lose themselves in the vanishing wilderness and real estate developers out to make a buck—unforgettable characters in nine stories that range in tone from crude cowboy humor to heartbreaking American tragedy. (Sept.)
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From Booklist

*Starred Review* The third volume of the author’s celebrated and eagerly anticipated Wyoming stories (the first volume contained the now-famous novella Brokeback Mountain, upon which the honored movie was based) takes giant steps in advocating Proulx as simply one of the most inventive yet, at the same time, traditional story writers working today. Borne on smooth, effortless prose, which glides easily into glorious metaphor, her fiction can as easily transport the agreeable reader to the Wyoming of 1885 as to, in two curious, amusing stories, the Devil’s lair in Hell, where he attempts to keep up with modern times (in “I’ve Always Loved This Place,” he is redecorating the underworld; in “Swamp Mischief,” he is fiddling with people’s e-mail). But, of course, it is the American West of past and present that we most desire Proulx to bring us honest tales of—gritty characters, the harsh environment, and domestic dramas set against the hard labor and small earnings of the Wyoming cowboy. This new collection will not disappoint on that front. For instance, “Them Old Cowboy Songs,” about the fateful homesteading ventures of young couple Archie and Rose, goes beyond poignancy to be a sheerly devastating story. “The Great Divide” chronicles another young couple’s struggles with the declining economy between 1920 and 1940. It’s difficult to label these stories as historical fiction, for they breathe such contemporary air. They are timeless in their depicted tragedies. --Brad Hooper

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 240 pages
• Publisher: Scribner; First Edition, First Printing edition (September 9, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1416571663
• ISBN-13: 978-1416571667
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.4 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (23 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #157,669 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "Who needs Hell when you've got Wyoming?", September 29, 2008

By	Michael Murphy (Glasgow, Scotland.) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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Annie Proulx's trilogy of Wyoming short stories "Close Range", "Bad Dirt" and now "Fine Just The Way It Is" is about a landscape and its people. In the latest collection, three strong Proulx 'Wyoming specials' - drawing on early pioneering struggles (Them Old Cowboy Songs), hardship spanning the Great Depression years (The Great Divide) and life in present-day Wyoming (Tits Up In A Ditch) - open a window into the lives of Wyoming people, past and present. To these three stories of hardscrabble lives lived out in the American West add two other modern well-told stories, "Testimony of the Donkey" and "Family Man", plus the entertaining "The Sagebrush Kid", a story of mysterious vanishings Bermuda Triangle style, transplanted to the Wyoming plains : six stories in all firmly stamped with the Proulx 'Wyoming' trademark. Two further stories are set in Hell - more on that later!

Some of Annie Proulx's best Wyoming short stories, "Brokeback Mountain", for instance, from the collection "Close Range", step out of the landscape. Proulx's powerful descriptions capturing Wyoming's harsh landscape are brilliantly done, with Wyoming's bleak, forbidding landscape of vast windswept plains or rugged mountains often as powerful a player as any character in a story - clearly exemplified here by "Testimony of the Donkey", a contemporary story set against the stark, scenic grandeur of Wyoming's mountainous terrain where the landscape all but becomes a character.

"Them Old Cowboy Songs", a sad story stepping out of the vast Wyoming prairie landscape of the 1880's, records the devastating pioneering experience of two young newly-weds in their remote homestead, confronted by poverty, isolation and a cruel landscape. Annie Proulx doesn't do 'sentimental' : what she does do in her distinctive unsparing prose is stark reality treatment of the West, uncompromising portraits of Wyoming folk hard-pressed to scrape to-gether a living faced with the grinding challenges of a hardscrabble prairie existence. Some homesteaders struggled through the hard times but others, desperate, defeated and disappointed, struggled on in vain, had "short runs" - and lost, hopes and dreams swept away.

A special brand of Wyoming hell is reserved for Dakotah Lister in a memorable contemporary story, "Tits Up In A Ditch". Joining the Army promises respite for the young recruit from a life at home full of setbacks where it seemed everything that could go wrong, did go wrong. Discharged from military service in Iraq, Dakotah returns home to Wyoming to the realisation that her past sufferings - at home and in Iraq - may pale in comparison with what her future holds in store..... Another modern story, "Family Man", recounts the recollections of old, 80+ ranch-hand Ray Forkenbrock, seeing out his days in a nursing home. But something weighing heavily on his mind rankles Ray : dirty laundry - an ugly family secret of an "old betrayal" he's kept bottled up inside himself for years.....

As well as recounting strange, ongoing occurrences of inexplicable disappearances of man and beast down the years, "The Sagebrush Kid" has a strong sense of the wheels of history turning as the winds of change swept through Wyoming - the stagecoach business consigned to history by the Union Pacific Railroad pushing through, old stage roads swallowed up in time by interstate highway, huge chunks of prairie vanishing under the drills of oil and gas exploration. This tall tale gives pause for thought.

Two stories, comic interludes really, are set in Hell - yes HELL! Outwith the bounds of Wyoming altogether! OUTSIDERS! Trespassers from Hell wandering like stray mavericks into country where they don't rightfully belong - and looking oddly out of place among prime stock. Range wars have broken out for less! Long-time followers of Annie Proulx's topnotch Wyoming stories, past and present, may view the stories from Hell as being out of kilter - interlopers into 'settled territory' that was fine just the way it was. After all, "who needs Hell when you've got Wyoming?"

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars End of the affair . . ., November 4, 2008

By	Ronald Scheer "rockysquirrel" (Los Angeles) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This book is a mishmash of different story styles, and not all of them as successful as the author's trademark accounts of life in the American West (past and present). There are three good examples of that genre here, and they surely must mark the end of her affair with Wyoming. Her usual grimly comic vision, still harboring a bit of romance for far-flung places and people living on the margins, has gone "tits up in a ditch" in this third collection of her western stories.

What might have been tragic ironies that resonate in the heart, as we find them in "Brokeback Mountain," have now evolved into outright despair. Moments of joy are so fleeting they barely have a chance to live and breathe before they die in the face of bad luck and life's cruelties. It would be hard to find anywhere a portrayal of life on the frontier (then and now) that attempts more openly to reduce the myth of pioneer spirit to a living nightmare. Reading this book I was reminded of the Richard Avedon photos of the people of the West, beaten down and ravaged, barely hanging on to their dignity. This is an American West rarely found in fiction since Dorothy Scarborough's "The Wind." Not recommended for anybody whose heroes have always been cowboys.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Every Bit As Exquisitely Written And Enjoyable As Past Works - But Different, November 21, 2008

By	Scott William Foley (Illinois) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Annie Proulx continues her mastery of the short story.

In Fine Just the Way It Is: Wyoming Stories 3, Proulx once again gives us stories primarily taking place in or associated with Wyoming. Her characters are terribly human--warts and all--and her stories are typically blunt, to the point, and full of (sometimes brief) life.

But, as straightforward as her stories are with their plainspoken characters, Proulx also delivers stunningly beautiful narrative language when detailing landscapes, flora, and animal life. Some of her imagery literally astounded me it was so well crafted and provocative.

However, unlike previous Wyoming volumes, this addition to the series is far more brutal to its characters. Now Proulx has never occurred to me as a woman who gets overly sentimental about her creations, but I was surprised at the tragedies she forced her men and women to endure. That being said, she certainly did not cross the line into sensationalism; everything she threw at her characters was well within reality's parameters.

Well, for the most part.

I was especially happy that in three stories in particular, Proulx exits her normally grounded repertoire and gives us something bordering fantasy. Now, because it's Proulx, we're not talking Tolkien here, but two of her stories hilariously focus on the devil and the other, well, I don't want to spoil anything, but it features a sagebrush where mysterious disappearances persist. I think that with her particular style and sensibilities, calling them tall tales may be more appropriate than fantasy.

Consequently, I sensed a real sense of dark humor in these stories, and I loved it! While most of the stories were very serious in terms of subject matter, they all utilized a morose fun that--unless happening to us--demanded a chuckle or two.

All in all, this collection was a bit of a break from Proulx in terms of style, especially when read between the lines, but every bit as exquisitely written and enjoyable as past works.

Proulx's talent is unrelenting with each new work she releases.

~Scott William Foley, author of The Imagination's Provocation: Volume II