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Fine Just the Way It Is: Wyoming Stories 3

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

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", flow out of the landscape. Proulx's power of conveying landscape is exemplary, 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 toughed it out through the hard times but others, desperate, defeated and disappointed, struggled on in vain, had "short runs" - and lost, their hopes of living the frontier dream swept away.

When I pick up a Proulx short story, I expect Wyoming, not Hell - unless it's the special brand of Wyoming hell reserved for Dakotah Lister in the 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 the strange, inexplicable disappearances of man and beast recounted in "The Sagebrush Kid", the different time-frames present in the story give 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. A tall tale that gives pause for thought about how the west has changed.

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?"

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.

If you read all of Annie Proulx's Wyoming stories ("Close Range," "Bad Dirt," and "Fine Just the Way It Is"), you'll understand a lot about Dick Cheney. Yes, yes, I know Cheney was born in Nebraska, but he was raised in Wyoming and is a living, breathing character right out of Proulx's gut-wrenching, gut-spilling, gut-shot tales of that proud and brutally beautiful state.

Proulx has a gift for the memorable image, for turning description and setting into action and plot. Her clear, sparse prose crackles with isolation, mistrust, and treachery of a once-civilized people gone feral, and her Wyoming is both magnificent and malevolent. She makes you wish you'd been raised in the midst of her characters just for the sheer blood and joy of it, and then just as glad you weren't.

"Fine Just the Way It Is" (a line one of her characters uses to describe Wyoming) even has two stories about the Devil and his vast plans for redecorating Hell, and you'll get the feeling the Devil would do well as a Wyoming rancher or small-town businessman. Even as the Devil raises his eyes lovingly to take in Hell's colossal landscape, you see Wyoming's rugged, isolating, gorgeous terrain of sharp peaks, red cliffs, and vast, haunting prairie. Bottom line on "Fine Just the Way It Is": only O. E. Rolvaag's brilliant "Giants in the Earth" captures a people and a place so exactly, so palpably. And Proulx saves her best story for last: "Tits-Up in a Ditch," a no-nonsense tale of the soul-abrading, body-maiming life of a young woman in Wyoming. It ought to be anthologized in every high-school literature collection.

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

Annie Proulx's latest collection of stories from Wyoming, Fine Just The Way It Is, also includes two bits about Hell; Wyoming may be better than Hell, but just barely, and only because it is so much less populated. Hell, together with Satan and his sidekick Duane Fork, provide most of the humor in this collection. The other stories are heavy in misery but not overweight. Proulx has a perfect touch with the miserable truth about things: her skill with stories is that she is neither condescending towards her characters nor overdone for her readers. The pitch in all the stories is just about perfect, although the one piece set back in the time of a Native American buffalo hunt was steeped in bathos and pathos, as well as blood and tears.

The loveliest story in the collection, with its own rhythm, underlining harmony, and a final succinct coda is "Them Old Cowboy Songs". "Tits Up in A Ditch" is such pure misery I hate to say I liked it but I did. "Testimony of the Donkey" was well-laid and carefully built up and quietly moving, as if it were a real story told by someone to me at the kitchen table, Shipping News sugar and cream laden tea between us, and with a big question left at the end: illusion or reality?

Speaking of Shipping News, and I always do when I talk about Annie Proulx, it is one of the best novels I've ever read. These short stories keep my admiration for her fully stoked.
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I'm not much of a short story reader, and this was the first set of Proulx's stories that I'd read (although I'd purchased Brokeback Mountain separately.) I'm a huge fan of her novels, although the cadence of her writing does take several pages to get used to and fall into. Once you've gotten past the semi-strangeness of the way she puts together sentences, you can see the true beauty behind them, the setting, the emotions, the deep characterizations are all just as wonderful in this collection as in her novels. My favorite, the last story about a veteran who comes home from Iraq a changed woman, actually had me in tears.

Bravo, to Ms. Proulx, for being able to put a novel's worth of feeling into a couple handfuls of pages. Truly outstanding.

Proulx' Close Range and Bad Dirt are both solid 5-star works. Not all the stories rate 5 stars, but most do, and the rest almost all get 4 stars. Some of the stories, such as Brokeback Mountain and Wamsutter Wolf, will leave deep and lasting impressions--much like Conrad's novella The Duel. In Fine Just the Way It Is, there are some very memorable pieces, but the proportion of 5-star stories is less than in those other two books. As with Bad Dirt, some of the stories are whimsical/fantasy, some are humorous, some are serious. You won't see the Elk City bars, you won't see Warden Zmundzinski (which is too bad!).

For me, the best--and strangest (at the end you'll pause to think over what you've just read)--is the Sagebrush Kid, about a large and sometimes decorated sagebrush bush in a remote area of the state. Nearby people and animals have the habit of disappearing--as the story notes, a small Bermuda Triangle in Wyoming. Family man (the lead story) is more your traditional Proulx excellent writing--about an old cowboy in a nursing home with a family secret to reveal to his granddaughter. It's a wonderful bleak view of the hard Wyoming life, where death comes in many forms: the cowboy regrets not having frozen to death on the range rather than waste away in the nursing home. One of the stories (saying which might be a spoiler) reminded me of Peter Stark's chilling "Last Breath" about different ways to die (or come very close to it) in nature--such as dehydration, freezing, being stung by box jellyfish, etc.

Overall, then, of the 9 stories here, I'd give a solid 5 stars to 3, and probably lesser ratings to the others. The others are good, but those three in particular make this book worthwhile.

She makes me laugh, and cry, and think. I own and have re-read both Close Range and Bad Dirt and I curled up with Fine Just The Way It Is as soon as it arrived from Amazon. It will be read again in the future, just as the other two will be. The people in her Wyoming stories are clearly defined and clearly Wyoming people and yet I recognize in them people I have known in the Midwest, the South, and on the West Coast. No one writes short stories like Annie Proulx and if, like some I know, you don't like short stories because you want a nice long story rather than just a piece of a story, try Annie Proulx; you might be surprised how complete a short story can be.

When it comes to description, Annie Proulx is undoubtedly one of the best and most unique writers out there. With her blunt, unsparing prose, a fierce intellect and a coal black sense of humor, Proulx can paint a vivid and stark portrait of American life, and nowhere is this on better display than in her Wyoming Stories, where the hardscrabble existences of her characters go hand in hand with the bleak words used to describe them. Here's how she introduces one of her characters in "Them Old Cowboy Songs": "Archie had a face as smooth as a skinned aspen, his lips barely incised on the surface as though scratched in with a knife." There's a paragraph from "The Half-Skinned Steer" in Close Range : Wyoming Stories, the first installment of the Wyoming series, which still gives me the chills years after I first read it.

Proulx's descriptive power is, primarily, what keeps me coming back to the Wyoming stories, even though neither of the sequels has been able to match the power of "Close Range" (which also has the distinction of birthing "Brokeback Mountain," the story the movie was based on). To tell the truth, each installment pales in comparison to the one that preceded it. Proulx has a fascination for fantasy elements that pop up in her stories that doesn't entirely suit her style (at least not when she's writing about the devil, who puts in a whopping two appearances in "Fine Just the Way it is"). "The Sagebrush Kid," about a man-eating, giant-size sage plant, captures something of a Twilight Zone vibe that makes it work, and still almost the entire middle section of this collection is taken up with the weakest form of Proulx's writing. Compare this to only one out-there story in Bad Dirt: Wyoming Stories 2, and hardly any in Close Range.

The bookends of "Fine Just the Way it is" are where it truly shines, and sure enough those stories are the ones that play to the intention of the Wyoming stories the best: slice-of-life vignettes that capture the essence of the hard living in such a violent, unpredictable location and the tough breed of human that it takes to live there. "Family Man" opens the collection by spotlighting Ray Forkenbrock, closing out his life in a retirement home and wondering just where the honor in his existence has gone, if there ever was any. Proulx closes it with "Tits-up in a Ditch," about naïve young Dakotah Lister, who enlists in the army and gets sent to Iraq after a failed marriage leaves her with no job prospects and no way to pay for the son her soon-to-be-ex husband left her with. While there are some winning moments in between, it is these stories that are the real winners in this collection. Aside from the fantasy element that bogs down at least three of the stories, "Deep-Blood-Greasy-Bowl" feels like a research project more than a story (indeed, Proulx pauses to explain that the impetus of the story was the discovery of an ancient fire-pit on her property and the research into Indian buffalo hunting that followed).

All in all, this is an uneven collection for Proulx, a supremely talented writer who may have been looking to shake things up a touch in her third visit to the Wyoming territory.

Grade: C+

I recently realized that Annie Proulx is one of the few authors of whom I can honestly say I have read all of her books. Fine Just the Way It Is does not disappoint. It revisits Wyoming, or at least how Wyoming is experienced by its rough and tumble inhabitants. Some in the past (Them Old Cowboy Songs), some in the present age of war (Tits-Up in a Ditch). One, The Sagebrush Kid, is close to science fiction, or the modern macabre of Stephen King. And, as seems to be usual with Proulx, many of the stories end with a character's death: bleeding to death, dying of thirst, thrown from a pickup.

To a non-native, these seem to be appropriate Wyoming deaths. As Proulx draws her characters, these are partcularly lower class Wyoming residents. They die from not using seat belts, from hiking alone, from loss of blood in a clumsy roundup accident. I won't use the phrase "entertaining deaths," but they are "appropriate deaths" and match the bleak Wyoming landscape that Proulx draws.

As an aside, "Deep-Blood-Greasy-Bowl" is one of the finest Native American stories this white man has ever read. See the world through Indian eyes would be my carnival barker's line in pushing this gem.