eliserjg's review against another edition
dark
relaxing
sad
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.75
A few shining gems in this. The wolf story, the kettle story, and the final one especially. Didn’t like it as much as shipping news but man does Proulx know how to set a scene
sarah_emily's review against another edition
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.0
jennyshank's review against another edition
4.0
http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/cda/article_print/0,1983,DRMN_63_3370654_ARTICLE-DETAIL-PRINT,00.html
Rocky Mountain News
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URL: http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/books/article/0,1299,DRMN_63_3370654,00.html
Proulx digs into eccentric West
By Jenny Shank, Special To The News
December 3, 2004
Annie Proulx writes of a West that is a touch more colorful than the one you and I inhabit. The first signs of this are the names of the characters who roam her second book of stories set in Wyoming, Bad Dirt, the follow-up to 2000's Close Range.
The men who ranch the land, haunt the bars and chase the women of Wyoming include Creel Zmundzinski, Jefford J. Pecker, Jumbo Nottage, Gay G. Brawls, Waile Crawshaw, Rase Wham, Deb Sipple and good old Wiregrass Cokendall. The women are no less creatively tagged, with Fiesta Punch and Mercedes de Silhouette among them.
Many of us have met plenty of Wyomingans whose names give us no pause, and can vouch that there are people named Bill and Sue and Joe in Wyoming. And those of us who have visited Wyoming and found life in our neighbor to the north not entirely alien from our own will be surprised at Proulx's depiction of many of Wyoming's inhabitants as a wacky, hard-bitten bunch of eccentrics. Who knew that things were so interesting up there?
Maybe Wyoming parents do refrain from naming their children Hannah and Madison, or maybe they don't. What matters is that the characters and situations Proulx has dreamed up for Bad Dirt work marvelously as fiction - the world she creates is entertaining and believable on its own terms.
So she lays it on a little thick, telling a few stretchers, with magical sinkholes, wish-fulfilling teakettles and imported alligators. Proulx is an East Coast transplant, so who can blame her for being taken with our superior lifestyle in this part of the country?
It's clear Proulx is so caught up in the myth of the West that she felt compelled to contribute her own lore to it. Proulx's stories are more outlandish than the work of writers native to the region, such as Kent Haruf, but they represent a perspective that becomes increasingly important as the West's population continues to burgeon - that of what we look like to people who've moved here from elsewhere.
The perspective of the outsider is thoroughly explored in one of the best stories in the collection, "Man Crawling Out Of Trees." In the story, a New York couple cashes out their savings and buys a home in Wyoming, one of the many pine-log "estates" that resulted when ranch widows "dumped the cows and called up the real estate brokers, who sketched out thirty-five-acre ranchettes."
The husband, Mitchell Fair, is initially drawn to the state because he "read an article in Personal Finance that named Wyoming as the best state for low property taxes and no income tax at all." But when he arrives, the landscape itself trumps the tax benefits: "Mitchell was stunned by the beauty of the place, not the overphotographed jags of the Grand Tetons but the high prairie and the luminous yellow distance, which pleased his sense of spatial arrangement."
His wife, Eugenie, who is a kitchen designer, agrees to the move because it will give her a chance to write the books she's conceived for years, "The Real Urban Kitchen-Takeout & Deli" and "Global Kitchen."
Mitchell warms to life in Wyoming, which includes interacting with their elderly neighbor, Eleanora Figg, who asks if he has sharp teeth because she's "always lookin for somebody to help us castrate lambs." But Eugenie feels isolated and can't understand the social customs that keep the Fairs friendless and unwelcome. Another newcomer describes the behavior of the locals this way: "Oh, they'll accept you up to the fence, but they'll never let you open the gate."
The Fairs, whose relationship is rocky for many reasons, find that their marriage can't survive Wyoming, a state that tugs so strongly on Mitchell and ends up repelling Eugenie. Still, when she decamps to New York at the end of the story, she's armed with an idea for "a cowboy kitchen for urban bachelors."
Many of the stories in Bad Dirt share a cast of characters and are set in the fictional town of Elk Tooth, with "a population of nearly eighty people." Together, the stories together create a sort of Wyoming Yoknapatawpha, a vividly imagined place that Proulx draws on time and again.
In "Hell Hole," we first meet Creel Zmundinski, Wyoming Fish & Game Warden, who, as an orphan himself, is "of the fifty-three game wardens in Wyoming . . . the one that most hated moose cow killers who left orphan calves to figure things out for themselves in a world of predators and severe weather."
By accident, Creel discovers a sinkhole in the road that can be used to swallow cantankerous moose mother killers and unlicensed hunters. The beauty of it is, it takes care of the problem hunter with no paperwork!
In "The Trickle Down Effect," we meet one of Creel's fellow townsmen, Deb Sipple, about whom Proulx writes, "By the weary age of thirty, he'd been married twice, and it hadn't taken permanently either time." Sipple, down on his luck, alcoholic and broke, tries to make money by hauling a load of hay from Wisconsin for Wyoming rancher Fiesta Punch. But Sipple can't keep from drinking and tossing his cigarettes out the window as he drives home, so his "return was the closest thing to a meteor ever seen in Elk Tooth, his truck a great fiery cylinder hurtling through the darkness."
In "Florida Rental," Amanda Gribb, who keeps the bar at one of Elk Tooth's three watering holes, is bedeviled by cows who sneak through cut fences and devour her garden, so she hits upon an idea to import an alligator from Florida to keep them at bay. Yes, Proulx occasionally succumbs to a weakness for whoppers like this one, but she sells them well.
In "Summer of the Hot Tubs," Proulx writes, "In Elk Tooth, everyone tries to be a character with some success. There is little more to it than being broke, proud, ingenious and setting your heels against society's pull."
The story concerns a mania that overtook Elk Tooth one summer, "a passion for outdoor hot tubs." Willy Huson is the lone holdout for a while, then succumbs and builds one out of an "enormous inch-thick cast-iron pot."
When "Summer of the Hot Tubs" ran in The New Yorker last year, it appeared tossed-off and slight, one of Proulx's lesser works that served up little more than local color, but its presence in this collection with so many other stories about Elk Tooth bolsters it. Even this seven-page sketch contributes to an understanding of the town.
Proulx has a marked ability to find humor in her characters' bleak situations - many of which are sad tales of divorce, alcoholism, ranch loss and poverty - without making fun of them. Well, without making fun of them much.
Still, Proulx's portraits are affectionate. It's clear she loves and knows this land, as she loves and knows its people, and her descriptions of Western landscape in Bad Dirt are, as ever, impeccable. Ahem, that is, pretty good for someone who grew up on the wrong side of the Mississippi.
Jenny Shank's fiction has won awards from the Center of the American West and the Montana Committee on the Humanities.
Rocky Mountain News
To print this page, select File then Print from your browser
URL: http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/books/article/0,1299,DRMN_63_3370654,00.html
Proulx digs into eccentric West
By Jenny Shank, Special To The News
December 3, 2004
Annie Proulx writes of a West that is a touch more colorful than the one you and I inhabit. The first signs of this are the names of the characters who roam her second book of stories set in Wyoming, Bad Dirt, the follow-up to 2000's Close Range.
The men who ranch the land, haunt the bars and chase the women of Wyoming include Creel Zmundzinski, Jefford J. Pecker, Jumbo Nottage, Gay G. Brawls, Waile Crawshaw, Rase Wham, Deb Sipple and good old Wiregrass Cokendall. The women are no less creatively tagged, with Fiesta Punch and Mercedes de Silhouette among them.
Many of us have met plenty of Wyomingans whose names give us no pause, and can vouch that there are people named Bill and Sue and Joe in Wyoming. And those of us who have visited Wyoming and found life in our neighbor to the north not entirely alien from our own will be surprised at Proulx's depiction of many of Wyoming's inhabitants as a wacky, hard-bitten bunch of eccentrics. Who knew that things were so interesting up there?
Maybe Wyoming parents do refrain from naming their children Hannah and Madison, or maybe they don't. What matters is that the characters and situations Proulx has dreamed up for Bad Dirt work marvelously as fiction - the world she creates is entertaining and believable on its own terms.
So she lays it on a little thick, telling a few stretchers, with magical sinkholes, wish-fulfilling teakettles and imported alligators. Proulx is an East Coast transplant, so who can blame her for being taken with our superior lifestyle in this part of the country?
It's clear Proulx is so caught up in the myth of the West that she felt compelled to contribute her own lore to it. Proulx's stories are more outlandish than the work of writers native to the region, such as Kent Haruf, but they represent a perspective that becomes increasingly important as the West's population continues to burgeon - that of what we look like to people who've moved here from elsewhere.
The perspective of the outsider is thoroughly explored in one of the best stories in the collection, "Man Crawling Out Of Trees." In the story, a New York couple cashes out their savings and buys a home in Wyoming, one of the many pine-log "estates" that resulted when ranch widows "dumped the cows and called up the real estate brokers, who sketched out thirty-five-acre ranchettes."
The husband, Mitchell Fair, is initially drawn to the state because he "read an article in Personal Finance that named Wyoming as the best state for low property taxes and no income tax at all." But when he arrives, the landscape itself trumps the tax benefits: "Mitchell was stunned by the beauty of the place, not the overphotographed jags of the Grand Tetons but the high prairie and the luminous yellow distance, which pleased his sense of spatial arrangement."
His wife, Eugenie, who is a kitchen designer, agrees to the move because it will give her a chance to write the books she's conceived for years, "The Real Urban Kitchen-Takeout & Deli" and "Global Kitchen."
Mitchell warms to life in Wyoming, which includes interacting with their elderly neighbor, Eleanora Figg, who asks if he has sharp teeth because she's "always lookin for somebody to help us castrate lambs." But Eugenie feels isolated and can't understand the social customs that keep the Fairs friendless and unwelcome. Another newcomer describes the behavior of the locals this way: "Oh, they'll accept you up to the fence, but they'll never let you open the gate."
The Fairs, whose relationship is rocky for many reasons, find that their marriage can't survive Wyoming, a state that tugs so strongly on Mitchell and ends up repelling Eugenie. Still, when she decamps to New York at the end of the story, she's armed with an idea for "a cowboy kitchen for urban bachelors."
Many of the stories in Bad Dirt share a cast of characters and are set in the fictional town of Elk Tooth, with "a population of nearly eighty people." Together, the stories together create a sort of Wyoming Yoknapatawpha, a vividly imagined place that Proulx draws on time and again.
In "Hell Hole," we first meet Creel Zmundinski, Wyoming Fish & Game Warden, who, as an orphan himself, is "of the fifty-three game wardens in Wyoming . . . the one that most hated moose cow killers who left orphan calves to figure things out for themselves in a world of predators and severe weather."
By accident, Creel discovers a sinkhole in the road that can be used to swallow cantankerous moose mother killers and unlicensed hunters. The beauty of it is, it takes care of the problem hunter with no paperwork!
In "The Trickle Down Effect," we meet one of Creel's fellow townsmen, Deb Sipple, about whom Proulx writes, "By the weary age of thirty, he'd been married twice, and it hadn't taken permanently either time." Sipple, down on his luck, alcoholic and broke, tries to make money by hauling a load of hay from Wisconsin for Wyoming rancher Fiesta Punch. But Sipple can't keep from drinking and tossing his cigarettes out the window as he drives home, so his "return was the closest thing to a meteor ever seen in Elk Tooth, his truck a great fiery cylinder hurtling through the darkness."
In "Florida Rental," Amanda Gribb, who keeps the bar at one of Elk Tooth's three watering holes, is bedeviled by cows who sneak through cut fences and devour her garden, so she hits upon an idea to import an alligator from Florida to keep them at bay. Yes, Proulx occasionally succumbs to a weakness for whoppers like this one, but she sells them well.
In "Summer of the Hot Tubs," Proulx writes, "In Elk Tooth, everyone tries to be a character with some success. There is little more to it than being broke, proud, ingenious and setting your heels against society's pull."
The story concerns a mania that overtook Elk Tooth one summer, "a passion for outdoor hot tubs." Willy Huson is the lone holdout for a while, then succumbs and builds one out of an "enormous inch-thick cast-iron pot."
When "Summer of the Hot Tubs" ran in The New Yorker last year, it appeared tossed-off and slight, one of Proulx's lesser works that served up little more than local color, but its presence in this collection with so many other stories about Elk Tooth bolsters it. Even this seven-page sketch contributes to an understanding of the town.
Proulx has a marked ability to find humor in her characters' bleak situations - many of which are sad tales of divorce, alcoholism, ranch loss and poverty - without making fun of them. Well, without making fun of them much.
Still, Proulx's portraits are affectionate. It's clear she loves and knows this land, as she loves and knows its people, and her descriptions of Western landscape in Bad Dirt are, as ever, impeccable. Ahem, that is, pretty good for someone who grew up on the wrong side of the Mississippi.
Jenny Shank's fiction has won awards from the Center of the American West and the Montana Committee on the Humanities.
kim_hoag's review against another edition
4.0
Proulx is one of my favorite authors: she writes of the Western land and people of which she knows, like Kent Haruf but not quite so emotionally breathy. Her drama often stretches to the Quixotic drama of which I've spoken before, but she can still be almost as intimate as Haruf. This is a collection of some of her short stories which demonstrate her broad spectrum of writing. I've never been a fan of short stories; I like to get deeper into characters and plots. Proulx, however, manages to make them enjoyable. She takes a little incident and whips it into something more substantial, then ends it before it can waste away. Such a one is “The Contest” where the men of a town all decide to have a beard growing contest. You meet the contestants and become intimate with their desires and reasons with great wit but nothing so deep that you can't pull out of, and that's the pleasure of reading her stories. After reading them you'll swear you'll find sand in you bed and an old, beaten, red pick-up in your drive the next morning.
danitrev's review against another edition
2.0
Is there a style called Wyoming Gothic? If not, Proulx invented it. If so, Proulx is the master of it. These are enjoyable short stories that blend "reality" and "magic" freely, with the same characters and places showing up again and again, either centrally or tangentially. The stories have a strong sense of place (Wyoming), and the portraits of its people are unflinching.
Also, I never realized she's the author of the "Brokeback Mountain" short story.
"The stories in Annie Proulx's new collection are peopled by characters who struggle with circumstances beyond their control in a kind of rural noir half-light. Trouble comes at them from unexpected angles, and they will themselves through it, hardheaded and resourceful. (...) Through Proulx's knowledge of the history of Wyoming and the west, her interest in landscape and place, and her sympathy for the sheer will it takes to survive, we see the seared heart of the tough people who live in the emptiest state."
Also, I never realized she's the author of the "Brokeback Mountain" short story.
"The stories in Annie Proulx's new collection are peopled by characters who struggle with circumstances beyond their control in a kind of rural noir half-light. Trouble comes at them from unexpected angles, and they will themselves through it, hardheaded and resourceful. (...) Through Proulx's knowledge of the history of Wyoming and the west, her interest in landscape and place, and her sympathy for the sheer will it takes to survive, we see the seared heart of the tough people who live in the emptiest state."
haramis's review against another edition
4.0
Bad Dirt features excellent, evocative language, but is uneven, and not as good as [b:Close Range|27999|Close Range|Annie Proulx|http://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1347693852s/27999.jpg|2888523]. This one ventures even further into rural tall tales, and for me, I prefer the "real" stories.
pearseanderson's review against another edition
4.0
Some pretty good Wyoming stories that go in all sorts of directions you do not expect them to. Proulx has a fun time with history, plot arcs, and what counts as "local", exactly. I love it and it inspires me to write like her, makes me feel like I can. Some standout pieces were "The Hellhole", "Man Crawling Out of Trees", and "The Wamsutter Wolf".
jenny_n's review against another edition
5.0
These stories are awesome. I really, really enjoyed reading these stories. The style of these stories is very much like an oral storyteller. Some stories far fetched, some full of odd characters, and all interesting. It has been many years since I've read even one laugh-out-loud story, and this collection has several. My favorite story was The Trickle Down Effect.
borborygmus's review against another edition
5.0
I don't normally read books of short stories - I just find them strangely undernourishing. But when thee writer is as technically skillful and funny as Annie Proulx, I can make exceptions. Some of these stories are satisfying in themselves, and yes, the standard varies. But the best ones leave you gasping for more - how can they end so soon? One of my favourite writers.