Fine Just the Way It Is: Wyoming Stories by Annie Proulx

Since you're reading this review, you're likely to be pro-Proulx or at least curious, in which case prepare to be delighted by this, her latest collection of short stories. Proulx takes us back to the rocky, unforgiving Wyoming of her bestselling novella Brokeback Mountain, in which her very particular blend of inarticulate men and grudging, put-upon women cook up soulful revelations, compromised marriages and bizarre, violent deaths, liberally seasoned with salty metaphors for the sheer, bloody struggle of human existence.

In Family Man, nursing home resident Ray Forkenbrock (one of the Proulx's more sensibly named characters in a collection that includes Rufus Clatter, Harp Daft and Sundown Mealor) finally manages to unburden himself of a painful and long-held family secret, only to be met by incomprehension and a shrug of indifference.

In Them Old Cowboy Songs, two homesteaders' dreams are shattered when the man goes off to work on a ranch leaving his young wife pregnant and unprotected. In The Great Divide, an old-time rancher fails to adapt to the new Wyoming of gas fields and oil derricks and pays the price. (Horselovers beware; there were many ways to subdue wild mustangs in the not-soold West, and none of them were pretty.) Proulx is at her urgent, muscular best when elbow-deep in the romance of hard souls and bittersweet lives. As a portraitist of the fearsome, awesome Wyoming landscape she is peerless. To read her descriptions of the West is to fall hopelessly and inescapably in love.

But every litter has its runts, as one of Proulx's characters might say, and this batch is no exception. In I've Always Loved this Place, the Devil gives hell a makeover and Proulx takes a satirical pop at some soft targets — corporate wonks, tobacco lobbyists, shopping mall architecture, the fashion industry — but satire demands rapier sharpness and in Proulx's hands it's a blunt instrument for force-feeding sermons.

If the object was to create a classy sort of moral foie gras, the effect is simply biliousness (though I did allow myself a luscious little shiver of schadenfreude at the thought of tax inspectors forced to walk across a boiling floor in red-hot Manolos).

In The Sagebrush Kid, a lonely couple adopt a sagebrush only to have the coddled plant bite the hand that feeds it, but the allegory is laboured, the story over-elongated and the narrative bears such a remarkable resemblance to Jan Svankmajer's animated story Little Otik, itself adapted from a Czech fairy tale, that it's hard to believe Proulx does not owe at least a passing debt to one or the other, though neither is acknowledged.

Kinder hearts than mine might say that even runts deserve a life. As for me, I'll just point out that for every runt in this collection, there are two absolute show stoppers. Not a bad ratio when you think about it..

Synopsis by Foyles.co.uk

The fantastic new collection of stories from the Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Shipping News and Brokeback Mountain. Fine Just The Way It Is marks Annie Proulx's return to the Wyoming of Brokeback Mountain and the familiar cast of hardy, unsentimental prairie folk. The stories are cast over centuries, and capture the voices and lives of the settlers this sagebrushed and weatherworn country has known, from the native Indian tribes to the modern day ranch owners and politicians, and their cowboy forebears. In 'A Family Man', an old man nearing the end of his life unburdens himself of the weighty family secrets that were his father's unwelcome legacy. 'Them Old Cowboy Songs' follows Archie and Rosie, a young pioneer couple, and their hardships in their attempt to homestead in the exposed wintry expanses of the prairie, and 'Testimony of the Donkey' finds a young international couple, Marc and Caitlin, struggling with much more modern concerns, and confronting uncertainty as their relationship comes to its end. These are stories of desperation and hard times, often marked by an inescapable sadness, set in a landscape both brutal and magnificent.Enlivened by folk tales, flights of fancy, and details of ranch and rural work, they juxtapose Wyoming's traditional character and attitudes - confrontation of tough problems, prejudice, persistence in the face of difficulty - with the more benign values of the new west. These are bold, elegant and memorable pieces, and once more confirm Annie Proulx as one of the most talented, unique short story writers in the language.