Annie Proulx

After you have read something by Annie Proulx, you tend to remember the “burdensome names” of the people she has described, those miniature examples of prairie poetry that sound like half-heard personifications or obscure cattle ailments: Orion Horncrackle, Gay Brawls, Como Bewd, Wauneta Hipsag, Pake Bitts, Fran Bangharmer, Lengthy Boles, Jerky Baum. It is not too simplistic to say that a register of Proulx’s characters helps to define the register in which she writes: her wry cataloguing of the everyday struggles and grotesqueries of those who live in the American West, especially the “97,000-square-mile dog’s breakfast” that is the state of Wyoming.

Fine Just the Way It Is, the third collection of Wyoming tales, continues this Dickensian delight in memorable nomenclature. So, prepare to meet: Duck Slaver, Harp Daft, the Grainblewer twins, Wacky Lipe, Fenk Fipps, Tug Diceheart and more. Like Dickens, Proulx has a keen eye for the eccentricity of the individual, admitting that “everyone in the sparsely settled country” is noted for a “salty dog quirk or talent” that their names might suggest. (One imagines, incidentally, that Saltydog Quirk could have been a serious candidate for inclusion in the book.) Indeed, in Bad Dirt (2005), the inhabitants of a desolate town effectively compete in an “eccentricity race” – involving a beard-growing contest and passion for home-made hot tubs – in which “everyone tries to be a character and with some success”.

This easy folksiness might suggest, at first glance, a Western version of Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon stories. But there, we are told that “all the women are strong, all the men good-looking and all the children are above average”. Proulx, on the other hand, likes to tell uncosmetic (plain woebegone) tales of a place where the average is distinctly “below average” and “the tragedies of people count for nothing, although the signs of misadventure are everywhere”.

However, it would be wrong to dismiss Proulx as no more than the creator of cartoonish cowpokes. She is, as the best of this collection triumphantly demonstrates, a sensitive and sensational chronicler of the decline and impoverishment of the West, where absurdity and despair often combine and – as Jonathan Raban put it in Bad Land (1996) – “everyone has the right to fail”. The register of outlandish characters is made to become, in the end, a comprehensible “roll call of grief”.

Fine Just the Way It Is contains nine stories that range widely in time from prehistory (“Deep-Blood-Greasy-Bowl”) through the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries (“Them Old Cowboy Songs”, “The Great Divide”) to the present day (“Family Man”, “Tits-Up in a Ditch”). They are mainly set in the realistically rugged badlands of Wyoming, but three include an unsettling supernatural aspect more suggestive of fairy than prairie tales: a satirical version of hell (“I’ve Always Loved This Place”, “Swamp Mischief”) and a man-eating plant (“The Sagebrush Kid”).

Such a summary is overly reductive, though; Proulx also crams each narrative with hints of other lives incompletely described, characters whom we only glimpse for a tantalizing second: “the teacher that got froze in a blizzard looking for her cat. The Skeltcher kids that got killed when they fell in a old mine shaft”; “a medicine man, R. Singh, whose presence among the Sioux cannot be detailed here”; and so on. We see that Proulx – like the “panhandle Scheherazade” of That Old Ace in the Hole (2002) – is determined to reveal the multi-storied aspects of the flat Wyoming lands: each glimpse emphasizing the unarguable fact that a person’s full life cannot be circumscribed and that, as Jack Twist notes in “Brokeback Mountain”, the hard reality is “nothing ended, nothing begun, nothing resolved”.

What Proulx’s prose comes to embody is a philosophy that John Steinbeck called “is thinking”, the virtue of being matter-of-fact in fiction. Steinbeck’s original title for Of Mice and Men (a relevant ancestor, surely, for Proulx’s short stories of the “short runs” of ranchers’ lives) was simply “Something That Happened”. Fine Just the Way It Is could be similarly headed: its outcomes routinely being that “some lived and some died, and that’s how it was” or “something ugly had happened”. But there is more to the stories than mere realism: they are “fine” not just in the way they show their shrugged-off fidelity to the everyday OK, but also in the moments of writerly brilliance they contain.

Take Proulx’s employment of metaphor, which is fine in both of those senses: deliberately unexceptional, and exceptionally successful. The standard image of the prairie – which is almost a cliché – makes ironic use of metaphor as a vehicle not of sameness but of difference: the plains like a body of water; “the sagebrush ocean”, as Proulx has previously put it. The metaphor is functional because it emphasizes, by contrast, the vast dryness of the environment, which is like an ocean except for its lack of moisture.

Fine Just the Way It Is instead relies on metaphors that reinforce rather than contrast, are constructed from materials taken from the environment itself: “coyote voices . . . crisscrossing like taut wires”, say, or “the dry land like a scraped sheep hoof”. Or this precise picture of “herons flying upstream, their color matching the sky so closely they might have been flews of wind”. We notice how the flying have become the flews (the tiny atmospheric particles of the sky); the thing described is absorbed into the indigenous imagery of the metaphor.

The result is that Proulx is able to provide a certain solidity in her descriptions of both people and place. Indeed, these two central subjects of her fiction are themselves metaphorically connected. Proulx sees her characters in terms of their personal “terrain”: Archie, in “Them Old Cowboy Songs”, has “a face as smooth as a skinned aspen”; “ridicule slid off Sink Gartrell like water off a river rock”; “pale legs were like peeled willow sticks”. And the opposite is true: the physical world is associated with the human. So, when a storm is seen “bouncing in like a handful of hurled poker chips”, the connection is made between the active sky and the activities of the ranchers stranded beneath it. Throughout, the climate is seen as anthropomorphic, described in the verbs of action (“lightning danced on the crest of Barrel Mountain, and then a burst of hail swallowed up the landscape”) and manipulation (“strong clouds rubbing against the sky like a finger drawn over skin”).

Such tight-reined control over language is best revealed in “Them Old Cowboy Songs”, which stands out as arguably Proulx’s most affecting ever piece of writing. It tells the story of Archie and Rose McLaverty who “staked out a homestead where the Little Weed comes rattling down from the Sierra Madre, water named not for miniature and obnoxious flora but for P. H. Weed, a gold seeker who had starved near its source”. The couple themselves struggle against the threat of starvation (“the land of no breakfast forever”; a memorably tough phrase), until Archie is forced to leave home to work on a ranch that accepts no married men, which means he is cut off from his pregnant wife just before she is about to give birth.

The following description of the birth – or, as it turns out, stillbirth – is both shocking and sensitive, a combination familiar to readers of Annie Proulx. And it is worth pausing, uncomfortably, over the prose to explore how the balance is achieved. As Rose suffers “cramping agony”, we are told that the day is “fading into night, the rain torn away by wind, the dark choking hours eternal”. Rose’s sense of the world is made to match exactly her internal sensation: the fading consciousness, the tearing, the choking pain. Later, we see “a dank clout swooning over the edge of the dishpan, the wall itself bulging forward . . . all pulsing with the rhythm of her hot pumping blood”. The metaphors here are travesties of images of love and life: the swoon of affection, the bulge of pregnancy, the pulse of the heart. They reveal all that Rose – alone, her husband far away and unaware of her pain – has lost.

But there is no softening sentimentality. Rose, we are told, “rolled the infant up in the stiffening sheet. It was a bulky mass, and she felt the loss of the sheet as another tragedy”. This is astutely poised: it reveals a world so bereft of comfort that a lost sheet is tragic (let alone a lost child). By emphasizing the former, one has a sense of the scale of the latter; the focus of the reader is fastened on something of comprehensible size. When Rose is forced to dig a shallow grave with a silver spoon that was “her mother’s wedding present”, the image is again suggestive of what she does not have: comfortable wealth (the metaphorical silver spoon in the mouth); the chance to be a mother herself; the man she married close by. The small object, wonderfully, is used to highlight the larger subject.

Proulx, then, is expert at the distillation of meaning to its essence. Take, as another example, her way of using an outcome as an adjective, which removes any distance between cause and effect: “dippers of goose-bump water” from the stream; “a mass of kick-leg flesh” of stampeding bison; “days of clutching love” in the first days of marriage. These phrases also demonstrate a winning awareness of the physical nature of experience, which again means a reduction to minute detail. Proulx reveals that she is, like the hunters in “Deep-Blood-Greasy-Bowl”, “exquisitely sensitive to nuances of the natural world”: “the tiny breath cloud of a finch on a willow twig”; the “twittering molecules of sky”.

Such a sensitivity is made to seem somehow old-fashioned (and you do not get more old-fashioned than prehistoric hunters), which is itself an important idea in this collection. The West, of course, is often synonymous with the past: in Bad Dirt, Proulx referred to a visit to Wyoming as “a trip into another time, a Paleozoic experience”. Fine Just the Way It Is, by its very title, proposes a discussion of the traditional view that modernity is to be suspected and resisted. And, in one sense, the author is guilty of fostering this backward-looking approach. The best stories are all historical; three are spoiled by awkward satire about modern life. For example, there are the descriptions of a hell full of denizens of “a savagely technological civilisation”, which has this sort of clumsy jokiness: “as usual, no-one had sent anything to devil@hell.org except spammers promising a larger penis, hot stocks, cut-rate office supplies and sure-fire weight loss”. Or the young couple who limply have a fight over their preferred type of lettuce, which grows into a “shouting match about fried bananas, Africa, Mexico, immigration policy, farm labor, olive trees, California”.

However, the tension between past and present is superbly resolved in the final story: the memorably titled “Tits Up in a Ditch”. This features Dakotah, a modern child of “the dun-colored prairie” who leaves to join the army and serve in Iraq (that inevitable reference point for modern American fiction). There, her arm and her husband are savagely maimed; back in Wyoming, her baby son Verl falls out of a truck and dies. When she returns home, we are made to see that the harshness of life is as it ever was: the “present seemed solid” and sorrowful like the past. And the imagery follows this, showing how Dakotah – whose name sounds like a place – renews her connection with her life and landscape. We see the “dying sun hit the willows, transforming them into bloody wands”, which mirror the injuries she and her husband have received.

This is Proulx’s own version of “dirty realism”: the realism that connects the dirt of the land to the dirty lives of the inhabitants. Fine Just the Way It Is shows that them old cowboy songs of struggle and loss remain the same, and are ever worth listening to. It also shows that, just the way it is, Proulx’s writing can be as fine as anything being produced in America today.

Annie Proulx
FINE JUST THE WAY IT IS
221pp. Fouth Estate. Paperback, £14.99.