Word: proulx
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
...Proulx once lived in Vermont and Newfoundland, and the works which made her famous--Heartsongs, Postcards and The Shipping News--are more than simply rooted in those places: it is Proulx's firm belief, a belief that sometimes seems to verge on determinism, that geography inexorably shapes human behavior. She now lives in Wyoming, and Close Range is a collection which grows out of what Proulx understands as the essential spirit of Wyoming: almost no story in this collection goes by without murder or sudden violence, without rape or incest or (nearly always) adultery, without man or woman being broken...
...important not to classify Proulx among the trendy and in general second-rate group of writers who are identified as "nature writers." Unmistakably, these stories are about people: indeed, it is that for stories which rely so heavily on the impact of environment on behavior, the Close Range stories spend such a small amount of time in actual description of the physical environment. Proulx' concern is the human consequences of the environment, which creeps into the stories and suffuses them with significance but never suffocates them. And in stories that address a limited geographical area and a limited range...
...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 and met seamlessly into...