SHORT STORIES: Fine Just the Way It Is By Annie Proulx Fourth Estate, 221pp, £14.99Annie Proulx's latest collection of short stories offers tales that easily match her best - but one or two, perhaps, shouldn't have made the cut.
WYOMING, SAYS an outsider in one of the stories in Annie Proulx's new collection, is a "constipated place of white, narrow-minded Republicans with the same right-wing opinions. There's no diversity, there's no decent food, there's no conversation, there's no ideas, there's nothing except the scenery."
For several years, Proulx has managed to wring some stunning prose from this seemingly unpromising place, creating the kind of characters made familiar to the wider world in the film Brokeback Mountain, a tale that contains many of the elements of a classic Proulx story. You have a pair of innocents scraping by in a harsh landscape. They are allowed a brief idyll, and are naive enough to think happiness can last.
But everything, from the weather to the grim stupidity of other people, is aligned against them. Somebody dies, in a gruesomely violent manner (in Wyoming, there's always someone "itchin to dabble in gore"). In the end, all that remains is a glint - of love or the memory of love or the knowledge that in this wretched life of perpetual disappointment, joy is possible. And while the knowledge doesn't exactly redeem them or us or the whole sorry mess, it's a reminder that every so often people rise above the mean circumstances that conspire to diminish them.
In Fine Just the Way It Is, Proulx's third collection of Wyoming stories, we get a few such classics. Lumped in with these extremely fine stories are two that should never have been included and three more that are middling.
Among the best are two about homesteaders in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Them Old Cowboy Songs tells of Archie and Rose, a teenage cowhand and his wife. "There is no happiness like that of a young couple in a little house they have built themselves in a place of beauty and solitude." Indeed, and you can be sure it won't last.
In the beginning: "The meat house was full. They had a barrel of flour and enough baking powder and sugar for the city of Chicago. Some mornings the wind stirred the snow into a scrim that bleached the mountains and made opaline dawn skies. Once the sun below the horizon threw savage red onto the bottom of the cloud that hung over Barrel Mountain and Archie glanced up, saw Rose in the doorway burning an unearthly color in the lurid glow."
Heading into their second winter, Archie is laid off. By spring, Rose is pregnant. Archie leaves home to find work. Circumstances dictate that he must pass months without contacting Rose. Cue for disaster.
The Great Divide concerns Hi and Helen, another homesteading couple teetering on the brink. When crop prices plunge, Hi enters the "ugly business" of catching wild horses for chicken feed and pet food. When that gets too ugly, he takes a job in the mines, always the hellish last resort for men used to wide open spaces. As is often the case in Proulx's stories, just when it seems there is light at the end of the tunnel, well, there isn't.
The two other strongest stories are contemporary. Testimony of the Donkey is about another young couple, members of the generation raised on Lonely Planet and fusion cuisine. Worldly as they are in comparison to their forebears, their fate is nonetheless as determined by landscape. Landscape in Proulx's work is never a mere backdrop but a force - stunningly beautiful but unforgiving of the careless misstep, and often indifferent to ceaseless toil. Proulx knows this landscape and its weather so well - the mesas, the snows, the myriad skies - that she writes of it as though slipping on a second skin.
Proulx has been asked in the past why women are so scarce in her stories. Women do appear more here than in her previous two Wyoming collections, their own forms of bad luck and misery often determined by gender. One of the most affecting scenes in the entire book describes a young woman and her dead baby.
"She got up on her elbows and saw the clotted child, stiff and grey, the barley-rope cord of the afterbirth. She did not weep but, filled with an ancient rage, got away from the tiny corpse, knelt on the floor ignoring the hot blood seeping from her and rolled the infant up in the stiffening sheet. It was a bulky mass, and she felt the loss of the sheet as another tragedy." In Tits-Up in a Ditch, a woman goes to Iraq, although the story remains resolutely about Wyoming and its inhabitants. As Dakotah, who's barely survived her tour of duty, travels the road home, she realises that every ranch she passes has lost a boy, "tipped out of the current of life by liquor and acceleration, rodeo smashups, bad horses, deep irrigation ditches, high trestles, tractor rollovers and 'unloaded' guns".
This "roll call of grief" belies the collection's title, which refers - with both irony and admiration, one imagines - to the stubborn mantra of the natives: "Wyomin is fine just the way it is . . . "
In The Sagebrush Kid, a childless couple adopt an inanimate clump of sagebrush and "raises" it like a child. Family Man describes an elderly father dictating family history to his daughter, the dark secret he reveals a bit implausible. Deep-Blood-Greasy-Bowl, which concerns a bison hunt in an unspecified past, reads more like an excerpt from a novel.
Finally, there are the stories set in hell. In Swamp Mischief, a bored Devil decides to supply a frustrated ornithologist with pterodactyls. In trying to figure out some rationale for this story, one wonders if perhaps it was a vehicle to enable Proulx to send Manolo Blahnik to hell. (Upon his arrival in hell, Blahnik will be made to wear man-sized copies of his own designs.) I've Always Loved This Place provides another opportunity to diss detested entities - tobacco lobbyists, pro-cyclists (for some reason), Canada Revenue. Of the hell stories, the less said the better. Their inclusion in the collection does neither the writer nor the reader justice.
Proulx has authored four novels and three previous books of stories and has won various awards, including the Pulitzer Prize. A few stories from this collection stand beside her best work. In The Great Divide, a woman waits to hear the worst possible news: "Civilization fell away and the primordial communication of tensed muscle, ragged breath, the heaving gullet and bent fingers spoke where language failed." This is the space in which Proulx operates masterfully, employing language to evoke the moments when language fails, on behalf of characters often unable to utter more than a few strangled words.
Even as she subjects these characters to horrific fates - crippling, maiming, dismemberment, limbs going gangrenous, brains pecked out by birds - a compassion emerges, and a clear desire to do justice to their suffering. Not because suffering elevates - terrible things happen to people and they're often no wiser for it - but because endurance possesses its own form of beauty.
Molly McCloskey is the author of two collections of short stories and a novel, Protection.