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"Who needs Hell when you've got Wyoming?"

Customer Rating:

Annie Proulx's trilogy of Wyoming short stories "Close Range", Bad Dirt" and now "Fine Just The Way It Is", is a magnificent testament to a landscape and its people. In the latest collection, three outstanding Proulx Wyoming 'specials' - drawing on early pioneering struggles, hardship during the Great Depression years and life in present-day Wyoming - open a window into the lives of Wyoming people, past and present. A sad story, set in the 1880's, "Them Old Cowboy Songs" records the gruelling pioneering experience of young newly-weds. Annie Proulx doesn't do 'sentimental' : what she does do in her distinctive unsparing prose, is stark reality treatment of the West, uncompromising portraits of Wyoming folk hard-pressed to scrape to-gether a living. Some homesteaders struggled through hard times but others had "short runs and were quickly forgotten". Small wonder then, as one old-stager put it, Wyoming "people thought they was doing all right if they was alive". Another 'hard-times' story, "The Great Divide", spans the years 1920-1940. It's 1932, Depression biting. For Hi Alcorn - a string of failures already behind him - money has to come from somewhere!!!..... A special brand of Wyoming hell is reserved for Dakotah Lister in a strong, memorable contemporary story, "Tits Up In A Ditch". Joining the Army promises respite for the young recruit from the setbacks and rebuffs piled on her life at home. Discharged from military service in Iraq, Dakotah returns home to Wyoming to the realisation that her past sufferings in life - at home and in Iraq - pale in comparison with what her future holds in store..... In Proulx's Wyoming, landscape can be as powerful a player as any character - clearly illustrated in the contemporary story, "Testimony of the Donkey", set against the backdrop of Wyoming's stark scenic grandeur. Another well-told modern story, "Family Man", recounts the recollections of old 80+ ranch-hand Ray Forkenbrock, seeing out his days in a nursing home, surrounded by ranch-widows competing for "the favours of palsied men with beef jerky arms" who in turn "could take their pick of shapeless housecoats and flowery skeletons" : but something much more weighty rankles Ray - a family secret of an "old betrayal" he's kept bottled up inside himself for years..... Two stories are set in Hell - yes HELL! Outwith the bounds of Wyoming alto-gether! OUTSIDERS! Wandering like stray mavericks into country where they don't rightfully belong - and looking sheepishly out of place among prime stock! Range wars have broken out for less! Anyhow, Is 'Old Nick Hell' necessary when Proulx's topnotch Wyoming 'specials' mete out their own brand of Wyoming hell?

Fine Just the Way It Is - Tits-Up in a Ditch

Customer Rating:

First things first - the Amazon title states that this is a paperback. Well, the one they sent me is hardback. For the price, you'd kind of expect it to be hardback. Nine stories, 220-odd pages. A greater range of stories than in the past. But all featuring Proulx's dry, ironic wit and cut-down, seemingly sparse prose. From 'Family Man', the first story: "It was the time of year when Berenice Pann became conscious of the earth's dark turning, not a good time, she thought, to be starting a job, especially one as depressing as caring for elderly range widows...She had believed the sex drive faded in the elderly, but these crones vied for the favours of palsied men with beef jerky arms." So, in a couple of sentences, you know exactly where you are and what you are dealing with. You know, also, that it is the present day - no family looking after these elderly people, only visitors. And what we get is a huge clash of values, a mutual incomprehensibility between the generations. What we also get in this short collection are ghost stories, winsome tales of the devil, tragic little family histories, so small that here is the only place they will be recorded, a story of life before Wyoming ranchers, and, finally, we get 'Tits-Up in a Ditch', just about the longest story in this collection and certainly the most brutal, cruel and beautifully written. Totally contemporary, linking ranching metaphors with war, the fate of women across cultures, and final betrayal by family. From Wyoming to Iraq and back again. Basically, the collection is worth it just for that last story. But overall, there are some real gems here, conjuring up the bleak beauty of these western states, the bleak beauty, cruelty, stupidity, fatefulness and even, occasionally, the humour of the situations and the people trapped within.