writesdave's review
challenging
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.5
Having lived in Wyoming for more than 14 years, I developed a certain realistic sentimentality about the place where I've lived longer than any other save my "home" state of Michigan. Realistic, because like everyplace else I've lived, the people there have a pride bordering on arrogance about taming the land, making it home, and fuck anybody for trying to live here if'n yer not reddy.
Annie's stories come from a deep and intimate knowledge of place, and really hit home with me even if my experience didn't reflect our protagonists contained within this collection. It reminded me not only of what I loved about the state but what I didn't love, and why I'm glad to have left for other pastures, not necessarily greener. What Ms. Proulx did was snuff out any sentimentality I had for the 307.
The devil stories pretty much crushed a 5-star rating, like she couldn't find another collection for them so why not put 'em in here? Otherwise, Ms. Proulx remains one of the best living American writers, an uncanny gift for describing a place and creating realistic and compelling characters.
Annie's stories come from a deep and intimate knowledge of place, and really hit home with me even if my experience didn't reflect our protagonists contained within this collection. It reminded me not only of what I loved about the state but what I didn't love, and why I'm glad to have left for other pastures, not necessarily greener. What Ms. Proulx did was snuff out any sentimentality I had for the 307.
The devil stories pretty much crushed a 5-star rating, like she couldn't find another collection for them so why not put 'em in here? Otherwise, Ms. Proulx remains one of the best living American writers, an uncanny gift for describing a place and creating realistic and compelling characters.
jennyshank's review against another edition
4.0
http://www.newwest.net/topic/article/annie_proulxs_wyoming_is_fine_just_the_way_it_is/C39/L39/
Annie Proulx’s Wyoming Is “Fine Just the Way It Is”
Annie Proulx shines again in her third collection of Wyoming stories.
By Jenny Shank, 9-08-08
Fine Just the Way it Is: Wyoming Stories 3
by Annie Proulx
Scribner, 240 pages, $25
In an award-studded writing career now in its third decade, Annie Proulx has made the remarkable transition from east-coast-based Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist to much lauded Wyoming short story writer, and she’s brought her devoted readership along with her. Who says the short story is dead? In Proulx’s formidable hands, the short story is thriving, a form that is by turns muscular and lithe, perfectly suited to portraying rough lives cut short that she makes so entrancing and heartbreaking.
Proulx’s third collection of Wyoming stories, Fine Just the Way it Is, includes several tales that are masterpieces on par with her best-known tale, “Brokeback Mountain,” and one, “Tits-Up in a Ditch,” that has to be in early contention for status as a classic of America’s Iraq war period. Proulx’s prose has never been better, infused with a specificity of landscape and emotion and marked by distinctive yet clear diction, such as in one story when a cowhand who was being unusually chatty and helpful realized it and “grouched up.”
Strictly speaking, not all of these nine stories are set in Wyoming—two of them occur in Hell. But the reader can be hard pressed to tell the difference between these locales as Proulx skips capably through time, setting her characters up in forbidding pioneer landscapes or in circumstances in which the harsh economic conditions limit the characters to dangerous occupations. This narrative seems to be continuous from the state’s founding to today, with the military or the oilrigs as its primary options for employment, a choice that faces Dakotah, the young female protagonist of “Tits-Up in a Ditch.” It’s telling that the two funniest stories in the collection are those set in Hell.
Proulx has usually been known for her male protagonists, but many times in this collection it’s the women who emerge as the strongest and most haunting characters. This is especially true in “Them Old Cowboy Songs,” a tragic love story of the sort Proulx does so well, set in 1885, when Archie and Rose McLaverty marry young. Archie, a cowpoke with a “singing voice that once heard was never forgotten,” was orphaned as a boy and left with no family on the Wyoming frontier following the death of the woman who took him in. Rose’s father moves away with her bedridden mother shortly after the young couple is married. In her epigraph to the story, Proulx writes, “There is a belief that pioneers came into the country, homesteaded, lived tough, raised a shoeless brood and founded ranch dynasties. Some did. But many more had short runs and were quickly forgotten.” And this couple, young and in love and without family to help them on the frontier, soon are erased.
Rose and Archie enjoy a few months of happiness, during which Rose “seemed unaware that she lived in a time when love killed women.” Then Archie loses his job on a nearby ranch and leaves the pregnant Rose alone on their remote homestead while he seeks work. “Cowhands rode the circuit, moving from ranch to ranch, doing odd jobs in return for a place in the bunkhouse and three squares.” Archie eventually lies so he can sign on as a cowhand with a boss who doesn’t hire married men, the consequence of which is that he can’t stay in contact with Rose.
Proulx embodies the indifference of the other townspeople toward Rose in the character of Flora Dorgan, a former prostitute who becomes the wife of a politically ambitious stationmaster, dresses herself and her stepdaughter in finery from Denver, and lords her privilege over everyone. This community neglect sets up a vivid, harrowing scene in which Rose, alone in her cabin, goes into labor two months early. Battered, bleeding, and barely conscious after her ordeal, she determines to bury the stillborn baby outside, but after she crawls back to the cabin, Proulx writes with the chilling understatement that is her trademark, Rose “heard the coyotes outside and knew what they were doing.”
Proulx could have sprung from Rose’s sad end to Archie’s tearful realization of it, but she does something far cannier. Archie, too, meets his fate during his rough work, and there is no one to mourn or miss either of them. One friendly neighbor who comes across Rose’s remains concludes that Rose “was raped and murdered and mutilated by Utes,” but no one in the town seems to care. In this story, Proulx has written a testament to every pioneer who struggled and lost, and every frontier woman who died trying to give birth, whose lives passed unremarked.
Between heartwrenching stories like this one, Proulx interleaves moments of levity, with two stories starring the Devil and Duane Fork, his “demon secretary,” in which the Devil tries to spruce up hell with ever more torturous and nefarious attractions. (Hell offers “stunning vistas of multithousands of refineries, ship-breaking yards, oil wells and methane gas pads stretching to the horizon.") And in “The Sagebrush Kid,” which must have been inspired by Annie Proulx’s recent years of work traveling through and describing Wyoming’s Red Desert (her Red Desert: History of a Place is due out in November from University of Texas Press), a barren couple nurtures a sagebrush that looks like a child, and the sagebrush endures for decades in the Red Desert to become perhaps the region’s only man-eating plant.
In “Deep-Blood-Greasy-Bowl,” Proulx builds on the anthropological discoveries found during the construction of her house to create a vivid, detail-rich account of a tribe’s buffalo hunt in the centuries “before the Indians had horses or bows and arrows.” Even in those days, Wyoming was a perilous place to live.
In “Testimony of the Donkey,” one of the three stories set in present-day Wyoming, Proulx introduces a couple who will be familiar to all who live in one of the outposts of the new West, who love the endless hiking opportunities that the landscape provides, but long for sustenance beyond iceberg lettuce. A quarrel sets up a dangerous solitary hike, and the outcome highlights the “overwhelming indifference of nature” that Werner Herzog spoke of in his documentary “Grizzly Man.”
Apart from “Them Old Cowboy Songs,” the real stunner of the collection is “Tits-Up In A Ditch,” which introduces readers to Dakotah Lister. Life comes at her hard from the moment she’s born to a teen mother who leaves her in the care of her unloving grandparents. Proulx writes of Dakota’s grandmother, Bonita, “Ranch-raised and trained, she counted the grandchild as a difficulty that had to be met.” Dakotah’s grandfather Verl is impaired from his time as a bareback rodeo rider, and he and Bonita raise Dakotah grudgingly, without a bestowing her a single hug. Dakotah marries straight out of high school, finds she and her husband are ill-suited for each other and they decide to divorce, just before she discovers she’s pregnant.
Dakotah’s husband enlists, and upon Bonita and Verl’s urging, Dakotah does too, leaving her infant son behind with them while she heads to Iraq. The end of the story is devastating, as Dakotah returns home to a scene of loss, realizing that “every ranch she passed had lost a boy, lost them early and late…” “Tits-Up In A Ditch” is so carefully crafted and filled with striking detail that you can’t help but believe it, and that stories like this are occurring every day among families sending their sons and daughters to Iraq.
Proulx is a great novelist, but she is such a master of the short story that I’m rooting for her to continue in her current vein and produce even more collections of Wyoming stories. When they’re this good, why stop at three?
Annie Proulx’s Wyoming Is “Fine Just the Way It Is”
Annie Proulx shines again in her third collection of Wyoming stories.
By Jenny Shank, 9-08-08
Fine Just the Way it Is: Wyoming Stories 3
by Annie Proulx
Scribner, 240 pages, $25
In an award-studded writing career now in its third decade, Annie Proulx has made the remarkable transition from east-coast-based Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist to much lauded Wyoming short story writer, and she’s brought her devoted readership along with her. Who says the short story is dead? In Proulx’s formidable hands, the short story is thriving, a form that is by turns muscular and lithe, perfectly suited to portraying rough lives cut short that she makes so entrancing and heartbreaking.
Proulx’s third collection of Wyoming stories, Fine Just the Way it Is, includes several tales that are masterpieces on par with her best-known tale, “Brokeback Mountain,” and one, “Tits-Up in a Ditch,” that has to be in early contention for status as a classic of America’s Iraq war period. Proulx’s prose has never been better, infused with a specificity of landscape and emotion and marked by distinctive yet clear diction, such as in one story when a cowhand who was being unusually chatty and helpful realized it and “grouched up.”
Strictly speaking, not all of these nine stories are set in Wyoming—two of them occur in Hell. But the reader can be hard pressed to tell the difference between these locales as Proulx skips capably through time, setting her characters up in forbidding pioneer landscapes or in circumstances in which the harsh economic conditions limit the characters to dangerous occupations. This narrative seems to be continuous from the state’s founding to today, with the military or the oilrigs as its primary options for employment, a choice that faces Dakotah, the young female protagonist of “Tits-Up in a Ditch.” It’s telling that the two funniest stories in the collection are those set in Hell.
Proulx has usually been known for her male protagonists, but many times in this collection it’s the women who emerge as the strongest and most haunting characters. This is especially true in “Them Old Cowboy Songs,” a tragic love story of the sort Proulx does so well, set in 1885, when Archie and Rose McLaverty marry young. Archie, a cowpoke with a “singing voice that once heard was never forgotten,” was orphaned as a boy and left with no family on the Wyoming frontier following the death of the woman who took him in. Rose’s father moves away with her bedridden mother shortly after the young couple is married. In her epigraph to the story, Proulx writes, “There is a belief that pioneers came into the country, homesteaded, lived tough, raised a shoeless brood and founded ranch dynasties. Some did. But many more had short runs and were quickly forgotten.” And this couple, young and in love and without family to help them on the frontier, soon are erased.
Rose and Archie enjoy a few months of happiness, during which Rose “seemed unaware that she lived in a time when love killed women.” Then Archie loses his job on a nearby ranch and leaves the pregnant Rose alone on their remote homestead while he seeks work. “Cowhands rode the circuit, moving from ranch to ranch, doing odd jobs in return for a place in the bunkhouse and three squares.” Archie eventually lies so he can sign on as a cowhand with a boss who doesn’t hire married men, the consequence of which is that he can’t stay in contact with Rose.
Proulx embodies the indifference of the other townspeople toward Rose in the character of Flora Dorgan, a former prostitute who becomes the wife of a politically ambitious stationmaster, dresses herself and her stepdaughter in finery from Denver, and lords her privilege over everyone. This community neglect sets up a vivid, harrowing scene in which Rose, alone in her cabin, goes into labor two months early. Battered, bleeding, and barely conscious after her ordeal, she determines to bury the stillborn baby outside, but after she crawls back to the cabin, Proulx writes with the chilling understatement that is her trademark, Rose “heard the coyotes outside and knew what they were doing.”
Proulx could have sprung from Rose’s sad end to Archie’s tearful realization of it, but she does something far cannier. Archie, too, meets his fate during his rough work, and there is no one to mourn or miss either of them. One friendly neighbor who comes across Rose’s remains concludes that Rose “was raped and murdered and mutilated by Utes,” but no one in the town seems to care. In this story, Proulx has written a testament to every pioneer who struggled and lost, and every frontier woman who died trying to give birth, whose lives passed unremarked.
Between heartwrenching stories like this one, Proulx interleaves moments of levity, with two stories starring the Devil and Duane Fork, his “demon secretary,” in which the Devil tries to spruce up hell with ever more torturous and nefarious attractions. (Hell offers “stunning vistas of multithousands of refineries, ship-breaking yards, oil wells and methane gas pads stretching to the horizon.") And in “The Sagebrush Kid,” which must have been inspired by Annie Proulx’s recent years of work traveling through and describing Wyoming’s Red Desert (her Red Desert: History of a Place is due out in November from University of Texas Press), a barren couple nurtures a sagebrush that looks like a child, and the sagebrush endures for decades in the Red Desert to become perhaps the region’s only man-eating plant.
In “Deep-Blood-Greasy-Bowl,” Proulx builds on the anthropological discoveries found during the construction of her house to create a vivid, detail-rich account of a tribe’s buffalo hunt in the centuries “before the Indians had horses or bows and arrows.” Even in those days, Wyoming was a perilous place to live.
In “Testimony of the Donkey,” one of the three stories set in present-day Wyoming, Proulx introduces a couple who will be familiar to all who live in one of the outposts of the new West, who love the endless hiking opportunities that the landscape provides, but long for sustenance beyond iceberg lettuce. A quarrel sets up a dangerous solitary hike, and the outcome highlights the “overwhelming indifference of nature” that Werner Herzog spoke of in his documentary “Grizzly Man.”
Apart from “Them Old Cowboy Songs,” the real stunner of the collection is “Tits-Up In A Ditch,” which introduces readers to Dakotah Lister. Life comes at her hard from the moment she’s born to a teen mother who leaves her in the care of her unloving grandparents. Proulx writes of Dakota’s grandmother, Bonita, “Ranch-raised and trained, she counted the grandchild as a difficulty that had to be met.” Dakotah’s grandfather Verl is impaired from his time as a bareback rodeo rider, and he and Bonita raise Dakotah grudgingly, without a bestowing her a single hug. Dakotah marries straight out of high school, finds she and her husband are ill-suited for each other and they decide to divorce, just before she discovers she’s pregnant.
Dakotah’s husband enlists, and upon Bonita and Verl’s urging, Dakotah does too, leaving her infant son behind with them while she heads to Iraq. The end of the story is devastating, as Dakotah returns home to a scene of loss, realizing that “every ranch she passed had lost a boy, lost them early and late…” “Tits-Up In A Ditch” is so carefully crafted and filled with striking detail that you can’t help but believe it, and that stories like this are occurring every day among families sending their sons and daughters to Iraq.
Proulx is a great novelist, but she is such a master of the short story that I’m rooting for her to continue in her current vein and produce even more collections of Wyoming stories. When they’re this good, why stop at three?
suncoyote's review against another edition
3.0
Following on my short story kick, I read Alice Munro then Annie Proulx. At the end of that journey I'd like say that I think I'd prefer if these two authors were actually one author. Munro has a tendency to describe the most minute variegates of emotion in a single social interaction. The way someone turns their head creates rippled of emotions. On the other side of that, Annie P will tell the story of a girl ignored and abused by her grandparents, yet just allude to the emotional interior of her character.
I think I'd like more of a balance from both authors, hence the Frankenstein blend I'm proposing. I found Proulx's plots better, but I preferred some of the emotional depth Munro gives her characters. I genuinely love Proulx's novels, and I think in a larger narrative she allows more space for that internal exploration. Is anybody reading something that feels like good blend of these two? I'm still on a short story quest ... I'm going to have to just keep reading.
Furthermore, what was with two Devil stories? They didn't really fit the theme of Wyoming Stories. Cue the Sesame Street song, "Which one of these is not like the others?"
I think I'd like more of a balance from both authors, hence the Frankenstein blend I'm proposing. I found Proulx's plots better, but I preferred some of the emotional depth Munro gives her characters. I genuinely love Proulx's novels, and I think in a larger narrative she allows more space for that internal exploration. Is anybody reading something that feels like good blend of these two? I'm still on a short story quest ... I'm going to have to just keep reading.
Furthermore, what was with two Devil stories? They didn't really fit the theme of Wyoming Stories. Cue the Sesame Street song, "Which one of these is not like the others?"
wendyfalconerslibrary's review against another edition
3.0
All is pain.
Pain and misery.
Killing blizzards, ruinious droughts.
Nobody loves no one.
And if you're really lucky, flesh-eating weasels and the neighbor's pet cat will stay fat all winter eating your beloved bride, after she's died, alone and in great pain, giving birth to a dead child, which is subsequently eaten by coyotes. (Beats the flesh-eating weasel, I say.)
And yet, I can't stop reading these stories. The only ones I really could have lived without were the ones about the devil. Though I love the idea that Manolo will be consigned to wearing his own shoes in hell.
Pain and misery.
Killing blizzards, ruinious droughts.
Nobody loves no one.
And if you're really lucky, flesh-eating weasels and the neighbor's pet cat will stay fat all winter eating your beloved bride, after she's died, alone and in great pain, giving birth to a dead child, which is subsequently eaten by coyotes. (Beats the flesh-eating weasel, I say.)
And yet, I can't stop reading these stories. The only ones I really could have lived without were the ones about the devil. Though I love the idea that Manolo will be consigned to wearing his own shoes in hell.
liliannattel's review against another edition
4.0
I really enjoyed the breadth of the stories, the beauty of the writing, the portrayal of a time and place. Be prepared for descriptions of lingering deaths at the hands of weather.
slamberts's review against another edition
2.0
This collection of stories felt like watching someone paint a landscape scene. It was interesting at times and well-written, but it wasn’t very immersive as a reader.
kabaum's review against another edition
adventurous
challenging
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? N/A
- Strong character development? N/A
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
2.75
fluffy1st's review
dark
emotional
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Plot
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.75
borborygmus's review against another edition
4.0
Very good indeed... except for the stories featuring the Devil.
larrys's review against another edition
4.0
Beautiful writing, tragic endings. By the end of the anthology I sort of knew that everything in every story was going to turn to shit. One bright-sided story would have been a welcome surprise. Also, isn't it easier to write a tragic story?