Small Is Beautiful

By Richard Lacayo

It's a girl's world out there. Pop music has room only for nymphets. Actresses over 40 are invisible to the movie camera. But the literary world is different. A woman can have a few gray hairs and still count on being published. It's a good thing too, because two of the best writers alive, Annie Proulx and Alice Munro, are well along into their golden years. And they both have new collections of stories that prove golden is the word for what they do.

For some years Proulx (rhymes with true), 69, has been a virtuoso chronicler of Wyoming's beleaguered ranchlands and the sinewy characters who insist on inhabiting them, generally in the face of good evidence that it would be a wise idea to move on. She covered this territory for the first time in Close Range, a magnificent 1999 collection of short stories. Now comes Bad Dirt: Wyoming Stories 2 (Scribner; 219 pages), another terse, twisty and entertaining assemblage.

Proulx's Wyoming is a hard-pressed place. Baked into desert by chronic drought, poisoned by toxic runoff from mining operations and chopped and diced into real estate, it's forever verging on the uninhabitable. "The country wanted to go to sand dunes and rattlesnakes," she writes, "wanted to scrape off its human ticks." All the same, most of the 11 stories in this book are lighter in tone than those in Close Range, a book that took regular plunges into awe and dread. In a supernatural shaggy-dog story like The Hellhole, about a game warden who discovers a very effective means for dealing with unlicensed hunters, Proulx renews the Western tradition of the short story as the tall tale.

Throughout the book, Proulx does a matchless job of summing up the human comedy of a modern West in which the cowboys are apt to pull up stakes to go to UCLA film school. She also likes to traverse whole decades in the space of a paragraph or two, as though to say that from the long mineral perspective of the Western soil and sky, sizable stretches of the 20th century might very well slide by in parentheses. It's the kind of perspective that comes with age.

Alice Munro likes to play with time in the same startling way, making it rush forward or double back on itself. A Canadian whose first book was published in 1968, Munro is routinely called one of the finest living writers. You can turn to any of the eight stories in Runaway (Knopf; 335 pages) and see why.

What especially interests Munro, 73, is the ways that people come to terms with their fates. Her central character is frequently a young woman from rural Ontario who moves to another life, only to find it unlike what she expected. Yet to make the move is essential, as Munro shows us in the title story, about an unhappy young wife who turns out to be unable to leave her feckless, disappointing husband.

In the three linked stories that follow--Chance, Soon and Silence--another young woman, a student of classical literature named Juliet, throws in her lot with a man she meets on an overnight railway trip. The stories then follow her across decades as time works its deeper operations--slowly, definitively, sometimes mercilessly. "So this is grief," she thinks at one point. "She feels as if a sack of cement has been poured into her and quickly hardened." After many years she arrives at last at a final equilibrium that could almost be called peace if you did not know all the things that still linger bitterly within her.

In the final pages of Powers, the unforgettable story that concludes this book, an old woman realizes that what she wants to do "is not so much to live in the past as to open it up and get one good look at it." That's what Munro offers her readers, the hope of that one good look. Her gift for nuance is such that you find yourself trying to imitate her. But what works for a fiction writer might not be the best idea for a reviewer. You risk having the reader fail to grasp your full meaning. So let's be clear about one thing here: this is a rave.