Fine Just the Way It Is: Wyoming Stories 3

Confession: I ordered this book because it was on Stephen King's recommended reading list in his revised On Writing. I figured if he thought it was good, it probably was, and it is. It's an excellent collection full of some really good stories, particularly the two pieces that reference the collection title. My favorite piece is also a piece that made me feel several layers of discomfort; I think that may have been Proulx's purpose; she has a knack for writing about the cracks families mend and gloss over, but she writes about them from the inside, where they are still felt, where every revolution the family members bump over those cracks and feel the pain or ignore the new bruise or tell a new version of the story, whatever is their method of letting that crack pass by. My favorite of such stories in this collection of Proulx is called Tits-Up in a Ditch, a dense and cruelly hard-voiced story that tells of a girl who came from people who considered her nothing and gave her nothing but what they must and loved her not at all, and how she got through and what she made of her life, and how she survived to circle back to family, not just the physical thing family, but who she was also. It's a desperate story, and dusty and bloody. And honest, so honest, and reading the ending feels like looking through a window into someone else's home.Buy this collection if you want some excellent stories that will challenge and inspire you; these stories will delight you!

Why 4-stars and not 5? Because it isn't as good as some of Annie Proulx's previous work and collections of Wyoming Stories. That said, it is still quite good. I found most of the stories to be quite dark and disturbing and very few happy endings. But these are Wyoming stories, so if you have read Annie Proulx's previous two books of Wyoming stories this will not come as a surprise. These stories really put the hook in you because they reflect so much of the reality of Wyoming. I found it hard to put the book down. Most of the stories are set in days long ago. Not all though. And there is some humor sprinkled in. Annie really gets it about Wyoming and the people past and present that lived there.

If you’ve followed Annie Proulx’s Wyoming Stories thus far, you’ve made a slow descent into the darkest parts of the American West. But each tale is exquisitely told, and each story a masterpiece in its own way. Some, the ones where animals are the principals, will make you laugh. Others, like the final Tits Up in a Ditch, will leave you numb; but you won’t regret a minute spent in Annie Proulx’s Wyoming.

If you read all of Annie Proulx's Wyoming stories ("Close Range," "Bad Dirt," and "Fine Just the Way It Is"), you'll understand a lot about Dick Cheney. Yes, yes, I know Cheney was born in Nebraska, but he was raised in Wyoming and is a living, breathing character right out of Proulx's gut-wrenching, gut-spilling, gut-shot tales of that proud and brutally beautiful state.Proulx has a gift for the memorable image, for turning description and setting into action and plot. Her clear, sparse prose crackles with isolation, mistrust, and treachery of a once-civilized people gone feral, and her Wyoming is both magnificent and malevolent. She makes you wish you'd been raised in the midst of her characters just for the sheer blood and joy of it, and then just as glad you weren't."Fine Just the Way It Is" (a line one of her characters uses to describe Wyoming) even has two stories about the Devil and his vast plans for redecorating Hell, and you'll get the feeling the Devil would do well as a Wyoming rancher or small-town businessman. Even as the Devil raises his eyes lovingly to take in Hell's colossal landscape, you see Wyoming's rugged, isolating, gorgeous terrain of sharp peaks, red cliffs, and vast, haunting prairie. Bottom line on "Fine Just the Way It Is": only O. E. Rolvaag's brilliant "Giants in the Earth" captures a people and a place so exactly, so palpably. And Proulx saves her best story for last: "Tits-Up in a Ditch," a no-nonsense tale of the soul-abrading, body-maiming life of a young woman in Wyoming. It ought to be anthologized in every high-school literature collection.

If there is a travel and tourist bureau in Wyoming, I suspect all of them have tossed a noose up over a limb and hanged themselves thanks not to Dick Cheney--although that would also do it--but to Annie Proulx. You just don't want to let this lady loose in your state for long. But you sure will want to read about those who have to endure living there. All of the stories are five-stars. Never thought about what to do with your dead dog? Stuff him and give him to a nursing home. Those residents will love patting him. "Family Man" is the opener, a guy who is allowing his granddaughter to tape record his memories of family except he has a little more to say than she might want to hear. And don't we all? This is not a bunch of stories about high hopes! But it sure is funny as one by one Ms. Proulx knocks her characters off. Not ha-ha funny. But black ha-ha funny. If you already love Annie Proulx--does anyone not?--then you will really love this Annie Proulx, including getting to know the modern devil. And it ain't Wyoming's other notorious citizen in the caves behind the White House although one senses that soon he too will get knocked off by Annie!!

I lost my first copy of this book. One Proulx short story nagged me and I trawled through all my Proulx short story books and couldn’t find it. A story of a young couple with a log cabin on the snow covered Wyoming waste. She Rose, pregnant and he Archie, off to find work at a ranch north of Cheyenne; an English ‘remittance man’ called Frewen makes an appearance. The story must have been told in that lost copy.I replaced the lost copy and was reunited with ‘Them old cowboy songs.’ A great writer can be analysed through the quality of their research and their literary method. Proulx tempts with a literary jigsaw full of colours, edgy cliffs and …nuggets. From Proulx’s jigsaws emerge fancy coloured riffs. Her pen dips and her thoughts dance across the page. And what about those nuggets the nuggets that lure you back again and again - was there something I had missed? Go research Frewen. The Frewen? Why does Annie select and name Morton Frewen? What happened to the ‘e?’A great writer can make a reader react. Salinger did. So there is responsibility. What do you want - propaganda? I researched Winston Churchill’s uncle Moreton Frewen. I read his brilliant memoir ‘Melton Mowbray and other memories,’ and noted that its Moreton on the cover of ‘The Cream of Leicestershire.’ I know about Castle Frewen Wyoming. Did Annie know about Lord Manners’s famous wager at the Castle in 1881? Or that Moreton knew personally every US President from Grant and Hayes in 1877 to Wilson in 1913, and he had sat around a camp fire with the Sioux chief Sitting Bull.All Proulx’s nine stories have some connection with death. Regulations, rewards, ratings and risk. That’s my filing system and ‘Them old cowboy songs,’ I’ve filed under the theme of risk. Proulx’s favourite story ‘Tits up in a ditch,’ I’ve filed under regulations. So let’s return to the chase:Language – 10/10Chase – 10/10Politics - 4/10 beef – more beef - and - potatoes Wyoming. Lord Manners and I consider Frewen was a gentleman, an adventurer, an ‘A’ list dinner guest and public speaker. Proulx differs and pursues this fine hunting man in her memoir Bird Cloud: ‘ …an extreme ass. Frewen was loathed by the locals.’ Proulx cans Frewen why?Who were Proulx’s ‘locals’ in 1880’s Wyoming: the dispossessed Indians, the residents of a few lawless towns, the hundreds of cowboys employed by British capital or the scouts in the employ of hundreds of European upper class trophy hunters ranging across this unclaimed territory? Perhaps they are the immigrant settlers’ busy fencing in the free range to the anger of the Stock Association members and cattle barons like Frewen in Johnson County – wrecking Frewen’s steer fattening business model.Humour/poetry – everywhere - it’s stamped with the genius that’s Annie Proulx.In pursuit of nuggets: women were entitled to vote in Wyoming Territory in 1869, Lord Manners - a visitor to the Frewen property in Wyoming in 1881 - went on to buy, train and ride the March 1882 Aintree Grand National winner ‘Seaman,’ Wyoming became a state in the Union in 1890. Louisa Swain aged 69 was the first woman to vote in the United States in a general election Laramie, September 6, 1870. Wyoming the ‘Equality State.’

Having recently mainlined Cormac McCarthy’s entire oeuvre & desperate for my next hit, after following up with the adequately satisfying methadone of Philipp Meyer’s The Son & American Rust, I took a chance on this, only to find that what lay within the wrap of my Kindle was just a pinch of henna powder. The best I can say about these lightweight offerings, which wouldn’t even be worthy confetti amongst the discarded jottings in McCarthy’s waste bin, is that I read most of them. But the two misplaced stories about the Devil…c’mon, what the hell???...3rd rate Douglas Adams or a pitch for a Simpsons episode…no?

Proulx is the most vivid short story writer I have ever come across. It isn't a generally popular medium but she is a past-master of it. Her descriptions leap straight off the page into the reader's consciousness, bye-passing all other distractions. You can hear it, feel it, smell it, taste it; and that includes abstractions like fear, hatred, jealousy and loneliness etc. etc.A reading experience like no other.

Had read most of her books about 20 years ago when the Shipping News came out and finally decided it was time to catch up on those I had missed. This one did not disappoint - I can't think of any other writer who captures 'bleak' so effortlessly.

Good