On Strange Ground

By John Skow

Annie Proulx twirls words like a black-hat badman twirling Colts, fires them off for the sheer hell of it, blam, blam, no thought of missing, empty beer cans jump in the dust, misses one, laughs, reloads, blams some more. Something like that.

Words won her the Pulitzer for The Shipping News, no question. The novel itself doesn't really track. The main character is gaumless in the first chapters and a functioning human male at the end, simply because the author has decreed a character transplant. But Proulx's language does not admit "yes, but" or "really?" When it works, which is most of the time, it sweeps aside all ideas, her own and the reader's, and allows no response except banging the hands together. Without this mad blaze of confidence, her next novel might have been a hanky dampener. Accordion Crimes traces an old green accordion from hand to calloused hand among turn-of-the-century Italian and German immigrants in New Orleans and the lower Mississippi. Told by Proulx, it makes a wonderfully strong, rowdy book.

And here's the sound of Close Range: Wyoming Stories (Scribner; 285 pages; $25), her new collection of short stories: "Pake knew a hundred dirt road shortcuts, steering them through scabland and slope country, in and out of the tiger shits..." (the reader fumbles this one but is swept on) "... over the tawny plain still grooved with pilgrim wagon ruts, into early darkness and the first storm laying down black ice, hard orange dawn, the world smoking, snaking dust devils on bare dirt, heat boiling out of the sun until the paint on the truck hood curled, ragged webs of dry rain that never hit the ground..." On this fine recitation goes, by sheer loopy eloquence getting a couple of beat-up bull riders from rodeo to rodeo in their falling-apart pickup, ending with, "...turning into midnight motel entrances with RING OFFICE BELL signs or steering onto the black prairie for a stunned hour of sleep." That's in a story called The Mud Below, and it just about nails pickup trucks and rodeo soldiers.

These pieces are, for the most part, Wyoming grotesques. The people are hard, and the view bleak, tending toward melancholy. Brokeback Mountain is a surprise, the matter-of-fact, sorrowing, sketched life of a cowboy and his friend, married men, ordinary sorts, who over the decades never fully realize that they are gay. Real guys aren't gay, because, sex aside, they don't know how to be gay. A story called The Half-Skinned Steer is as grim as its title, and it begins, "In the long unfurling of his life, from tight-wound kid hustler in a wool suit riding the train out of Cheyenne to geriatric limper in this spooled-out year, Mero had kicked down thoughts of the place where he began, a so-called ranch on strange ground at the south hinge of the Big Horns."

This is a remarkable sentence. There's not a flabby or unnecessary phrase, and no evidence of virtuoso preening, of an author too appreciatively tasting her own words. "Spooled-out year" and "kicked down" suggest a man who tossed his mental baggage together in a hurry, and "strange ground" says something of where he is going. As always, when signs are this clear that an author knows her trade, the reader signs on for the journey.

--By John Skow