Annie Proulx, Close Range (1999)
Annie Proulx (born 1935) can seem like a formidable figure. My aunt Nona didn’t have this problem. Nona had the incisive kind of mind that could sharpen itself on the whetstone of Proulx’s granite prose. Proulx is one of those writers who knows how to hold her silence. She didn’t publish her first book until she was fifty-six. She lived life the right way round. A lot of people do their talking young and learn to listen later.
Nona read books like her life depended on it. She could talk and listen simultaneously. Her fluency was famous. One time, she left the table to answer the phone, leaving the rest of us to think that we wouldn’t see her again for quite some time. Nevertheless, she returned to us after a mere twenty minutes.
‘That was a quick call,’ someone said.
‘It was a wrong number,’ she replied, without apology, before leaning in to complete the sentence she had left unfinished. Her conversation was torrential; it made things grow.
Nona took exception to The Shipping News (1993), Proulx’s Pulitzer Prize-winning second novel, because she found it so bleak. A newspaperman called Quoyle moves from New York to allow his life to be reshaped by the forces of nature in Newfoundland. In the early pages, both Quoyle’s parents die in awful circumstances and he discovers his wife is making extra cash as a sex worker. She then dies in a car crash and Quoyle is left with their two kids to look after. By the time Nona read this fiction, she had already buried two of her own children, one as a baby and the other as a young adult. One death was foreseen, the other not, but foresight does nothing to soften the colours of grief. Nona spoke of many things but not this. Except to Annie Proulx, when about five hundred other people were listening in. Hers was the first hand in the air at a literary event we both attended.
‘Two of my children have died,’ said Nona. ‘Why do I need to read books like yours when I have enough reality of my own?’
The audience applauded the question.
Proulx was stunned and consulted with the chairwoman who was on the stage with her.
‘I am sorry for your pain,’ she said. ‘But that is why I write. I write because there is pain, not to make pain.’
The audience applauded the answer.
Annie Proulx is a tough writer. There are times when reading her stories feels like washing your face with sandpaper. For all that, or because of it, Close Range is an extraordinary collection of stories, far more exacting than The Shipping News. They use very little emotional language to describe the profound emotional struggles of isolated people. Close Range is an uncomfortable source of comfort.
The book includes ‘Brokeback Mountain’, which was made into a movie by Ang Lee. It is one of the most masterly stories I have ever encountered, and it is a pity that both it and the movie carry the burden of being typecast as ‘the gay cowboy story’. ‘Brokeback Mountain’ is not about homosexuality but the suffocation of it. It sorrows for the ways in which fear curdles tenderness, turns it sour. The heart of the story is not a relationship but loneliness and isolation. Like many of the stories in this great book, it scorns the idea of an individual trying to dominate or control their world. ‘Brokeback Mountain’ ends with a flinty statement of fatalism without grace or redemption: ‘There was some open space between what he knew and what he tried to believe, but nothing could be done about it, and if you can’t fix it you’ve got to stand it.’
All the stories in Close Range are set in Wyoming, where Proulx moved in the mid-1990s. Wyoming is the least populous state of the United States and large parts of it, especially in the west, are inhabited by rock. It is also 93 per cent white and less than 2 per cent African American. It is not wealthy. There are as many guns as people, probably more. Clichés abound to describe such people and ‘trailer trash’ might be one of them, but Annie Proulx is not much interested in clichés.
There is a minor character in one of these stories, ‘The Governors of Wyoming’, called Skipper. For once, cattle prices are solid and he pays cash for a car for his wife. Their two sons are mucking around and manage to get trapped in the trunk of dad’s new trophy:
Out there on the prairie something—the evasive turn of a harried bird with a motion like a convulsive kick?—made him stop and open the trunk. In that airless oven they lay limp and blue. It was wrong what they said about grief. It augered inside you forever, boring fresh holes even when you were sieved. Ziona lived now in San Diego, remarried, and with other children, but he was still here seeing the places they had been every day.
These few lines bear the scorch marks of Proulx’s genius. Nature is an implacable God. The inevitable collapse of a marriage happens in the space between two sentences. Above all, there is a withering insight into the nature of grief.
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There is abundant humour in Proulx. We meet a rodeo rider who believes Jesus was a cowboy because the Bible says Jesus rode bareback on an unbroken donkey. This man becomes a wisdom figure. There is another man who gets killed by an emu because someone thinks they can make a buck out of bringing Australian fauna into the ranch country. There is, in ‘Job History’, an understanding of the way life can be so intense that it denies life. There are few lucky breaks. You sense that Annie Proulx longs for things to be different but she isn’t prepared to lie just to make it so.