Fatalism dims shine of Proulx's prose

Close Range: Wyoming Stories
by Annie Proulx. Scribner. 283 pages. $25.

     For those who loved E. Annie Proulx's Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning "The Shipping News" (1993) but dutifully plodded through her mini-epic "Accordian Crimes" (1996), "Close Range: Wyoming Stories" might win you back. Or it might not.
     In the best stories of "Close Range," Annie Proulx (she has dropped the "E") achieves the thoughtful intimacy of her finest work. "A Lonely Coast" and "The Half-Skinned Steer" are two such tales, the former addressing the painful solitude and random violence in the lives of waitresses, and the latter dramatizing an aging ex-rancher's memories during a fatally determined cross-country drive to his estranged brother's funeral.
     Though Proulx draws sensitive portraits of characters limited by geography and economic class, the crushing fatalism of these narratives begins to grate on even the most patient reader. It is one thing to depict the ways in which lived experience shapes a life, and another to fall into a despondent determinism, watching character after character succumb to unconquerable social forces. A "morbid passion for the ranch" - to borrow the book's description of Car Scrope, one of "Close Range's" sad misogynists - all too aptly characterizes this collection.
     That said, its expose of how society limits individual choices places "Close Range" and "Accordian Crimes" in the excellent company of John Dos Passos' "USA" trilogy and Theodore Dreiser's "Sister Carrie." And, as in all of her work, Proulx's language sparkles with vivid description and a poet's attention to diction.
     One can truly see the "cloven oval" of a horseshoe's print and look up to the "intricate sky" with its "flocks of small birds like packs of cards thrown up in the air." Proulx's Wyoming is a beautiful landscape punctuated by rape, despair and dead dreams.
    
PHIL NEL
     (Phil Nel is an adjunct professor of English at the College of Charleston.)