Close Range: Wyoming Stories
By Annie Proulx
New York:  Scribner, Deadline Press, 1999

                                                Review by Dr. Susan K. Hedahl

           Why, are you wondering, is she reviewing a book that came out over six years ago? I'll get to that in a moment.... If you poll people (supposedly those who qualify for the "well-read" category), surprisingly few seem to have read Proulx in this part of America.  She has won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction as well as numerous other prestigious awards.  The title of this collection of short stories may yield a clue for lack of attention to this author's works; she is deeply and perfectly regional in flavor.  You'll need to look far to find someone who has "captured" Wyoming as well as she does.

             These short stories revolve around the gritty, tough-minded individuals who work the ranches, rodeos circuits, small cafes, dude ranches, farms and rural enclaves of a state that takes a great toll on those who live in its vast, weather-beaten regions.   The women are as tough and real as the men and sometimes tougher. Both sexes win and lose at the game of life in equal fashion. 

 Proulx's descriptions of young adults coming of age can unexpectedly break one's heart.  Sometimes they are just plain funny.   In "The Half-skinned Steer," a young kid is asked to show an anthropologist around some caves with ancient drawings on the wall.  When asked if he knows what at a symbol is, comes the reply: "Yes, said Mero, who had seen them clapped together in the high school marching band." (p. 26)

             Religious perspectives move about subtly in this book, mostly undercover in the lives of those who don't live anywhere around actual geographical representations of Christianity: churches and the faithful (in the usual sense) don't complicate the landscape.  One cowboy tells his buddy that his intensely religious wife is studying for a degree in geology. Asks the buddy, "How can a geologist believe that the earth was created in seven days?"  His friend replies, "Shoot, she's a Christian geologist.  Nothin is impossible for God and he could do it all in seven days, fossils, the whole nine. Life is full of wonders..." [ p. 67]

            These stories are real, ranging between the ruefully learned lessons of existence and the bawdy. They also have their severely dark moments.  But back to the beginning of this review and the reason for another look at this story collection.  The last story is "Brokeback Mountain," featuring Ennis del Mar and Jack Twist.  This is the story on which the current movie of the same name is based.   So eloquent and so sad is this work; so well written and existentially difficult, that I am not sure I'll see the movie. It's difficult to imagine a movie doing justice to this story of unrequited love.

             If you have not come across Annie Proulx, this is a good book with which to start.  She is an author with a true, deep Wyoming heart who instructors the reader well in the unreadable depths of the human and the divine.