Word: brokeback
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Dates: during 1999-1999
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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...
...tragedy does become uninteresting: one begins, at times, to wish for a hint of lives that are not being slowly ground down. But these are remarkably few weak points in a collection of 11 stories: and in stories like "The Half-Skinned Steer," "The Mud Below," and, most strikingly, "Brokeback Mountain," Proulx reasserts herself with a force that has grown and become refined since the fine Heartsongs collection. She has developed herself as a chronicler of memory, and her protagonists in these stories are more psychologically compelling than even the strongest characters in Heartsongs. The past bleeds silently...
...tragedy does become uninteresting: one begins, at times, to wish for a hint of lives that are not being slowly ground down. But these are remarkably few weak points in a collection of 11 stories: and in stories like "The Half-Skinned Steer," "The Mud Below," and, most strikingly, "Brokeback Mountain," Proulx reasserts herself with a force that has grown and become refined since the fine Heartsongs collection. She has developed herself as a chronicler of memory, and her protagonists in these stories are more psychologically compelling than even the strongest characters in Heartsongs. The past bleeds silently...