Stories from Wyoming

THERE is no better writer alive, who is as good as Cormac McCarthy when it comes to singing (or more properly writing about) the American West. With her new book, Close Range: Wyoming Stories (Fourth Estate), E. Annie Proulx shows she can run the master close, especially with stories like Brokeback mountain, a novella that is the centre-piece of the book. This is not to say that this book approaches her finest novel to date, The Shipping News which won her both the Pulitzer and the National Book Award (which I imagine must be as rare as J.M. Coetzee winning the Booker twice) as well as the Irish Times International Prize when it was published in 1993. Since then she has published another novel, Accordion Crimes, and a collection of short stories, "Heart Songs". Not bad going at all for a writer who published her first novel, Postcards, at the age of 56.

Close Range ... shows that a genuinely great writer can turn pretty much any sort of material to her advantage. The rugged country of Wyoming is not quite the coast of Newfoundland that Proulx has made her own, but it shares some of its characteristics - wide open country, a hard and unforgiving land that attracts loners, misfits and cranks, tough as old leather, with a rugged individualism.

The author's two great strengths are her ability to crack open the outer carapaces of these suspicious, unfriendly people to reveal the vulnerable human being within, and a virtually unparalleled ability to describe the scenic grandeur of places like Wyoming without resorting to the sort of cliche and purple prose beloved of travel brochures and advertisements of Marlboro cigarettes. Both these qualities are seen to excellent effect in "Brokeback Mountain", the best story by far in the book.

It tells the stories of two cowboys, Jack Twist and Ennis del Mar, who first meet as young men on a job herding sheep on Brokeback Mountain. It is a short term job and a very lonely one, and in the course of the long cold nights and miserable days, as they keep watch over the sheep to make sure they do not fall off a cliff or disappear into the jaws of an opportunistic coyote, Jack and Ennis grow close. Closer than usual it turns out, for one day they have sex with each other, something which shocks both of them, although it perhaps shocks Ennis more than Jack, for he is engaged to be married and has always gone for the opposite sex. Jack says the same thing, but once they have got over the shock they go at it like there is no tomorrow unmindful of coyotes, sleet and straying sheep. All through the season they stay lovers and then split up, Ennis to get married and raise children, and Jack to do the same, a few months down the line. Four summers later, Jack gets back in touch with Ennis and it is as if a volcano has erupted in both of them, especially in Ennis who has hardly every felt the need to appraise a man sexually after Brokeback Mountain. Jack arrives and the two cannot wait to get to a motel. The connection resumed, neither wants to let it go. It takes the inevitable toll - Ennis is divorced by his wife and Jack gets his head stove in by a tire iron in the rough town he lives in where homosexuals get the treatment. Proulx handles the story exceedingly well, this bleak cameo of homosexual love in the macho world of cowboys, horses and frontier derring do. And as always the descriptive set pieces are exquisite: "Ennis and Jack, the dogs, horses and mules, a thousand ewes and their lambs flowed up the trail like dirty water through the timber and out above the tree into the great flowery meadows and the coursing, endless wind ... Dawn came glassy orange, stained from below by a gelatinous band of pale green. The sooty bulk of the mountain paled slowly until it was the same color as the smoke from Ennis's breakfast fire.

The cold air sweetened, banded pebbles and crumbs of soil cast sudden pencil-long shadows and the rearing lodgepole pines below them massed in slabs of somber malachite". The other stories in the book I liked were "The Half Skinned Steer", about a rodeo rider and "The Mud Below", the story of an old man who has made good, visiting a remote ranch to see his brother's widow. There are stories with a twist in the tale and there is a one page story "55 Miles to the Gas Pump" which is more macabre than most full-length novels by Shlock horror writers.

Close Range is a worthy book from one of America's best writers, and all those who know and love Proulx should not hesitate to pick it up. If you have not read her yet, start with

The Shipping News.

DAVID DAVIDAR

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