Product Description

Annie Proulx's new collection is peopled by characters who struggle with circumstances beyond their control. Born to ranching, drawn to it, or desperate to get out, they inhabit worlds that are isolated and often dangerous. Trouble comes at them from unexpected angles, and they drive themselves through it, hardheaded and resourceful. No one writes better than Proulx about the American west and about lives that may no longer be viable. This is a stunning collection by one of the most vivid and exhilarating writers of our time.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #193545 in Books
• Published on: 2005-09-20
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780743260145
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

From Publishers Weekly
The beautiful and harsh terrain of Wyoming and the tough and often eccentric people who make their lives there are again on display in this collection of stories (a sequel to the much-lauded Close Range: Wyoming Stories). In "What Kind of Furniture Would Jesus Pick?" Gilbert Wolfscale struggles with drought and debt to hold on to the ranch that has been passed down in his family for generations, driving off his wife and two sons, who have no interest in continuing the legacy. Many old-time ranch owners in this territory are women, and they face similar struggles: in "The Trickle Down Effect," Fiesta Punch hires local ne'er-do-well Deb Sipple for a long-distance hay haul, with disastrous results. Proulx does leaven her tales of hardship and woe with a dry humor, and she doesn't forget to tackle the misguided romance sought by newcomers to the land, as in "Man Crawling Out of Trees," in which a retired couple from the Northeast find that the quiet truce of their marriage can't survive encounters with the resentful locals. While none of the stories in this collection approaches the sweep and wholeness of "Brokeback Mountain" (the standout story from Close Range, and soon to be a major film), and other pieces are little more than whimsical sketches (sometimes with a touch of the magical), they paint a rich, colorful picture of local life.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post
The blasted Wyoming countryside was the true protagonist of Close Range, Annie Proulx's 1999 collection of stories. Against this backdrop of "dangerous and indifferent ground," Fate pistol-whips doomed cowboys and past-their-prime ranchers: "The tragedies of people count for nothing although the signs of misadventure are everywhere." Proulx is not the sort of writer who lets you forget her presence; her eccentric, serpentine sentences and jarring imagery preen like peacocks. In Close Range, numerous descriptions of the landscape often come as lavish strings of clauses that read like chants: "Indigo jags of mountain, grassy plain everlasting, tumbled stones like fallen cities, the flaring roll of sky." If her prose has a mesmerizing rhythm that sweeps the reader along, it can also eclipse real human feeling; so many purple depictions of terrestrial features leave little room for characters' souls to bloom. Still, in "Brokeback Mountain," the story of two cowboys grappling with their mutual sexual attraction, she hit emotional pay dirt. Reading it was like watching a wrestling match between showy style and deeply felt anguish and desire; here, the human element claimed a victory.

Proulx has toned down the poetry in Bad Dirt, her second volume of Wyoming stories. Instead, she's chosen a more straightforward narrative voice. This partial shearing away of lyrical frills might have revealed the poverty and emotional isolation of Western life in a new, harsher light. Instead, the book has the feel of a rush job, as though Proulx couldn't be bothered to add color or vividness. The stories are slackly plotted -- repeatedly, the author substitutes an accumulation of detail for suspense or narrative drive. Background is needlessly spun out. "The Indian Wars Refought" begins with eight pages of meandering wind-up; we learn about the construction of a building 100 years ago, the three generations of lawyers who occupied the building, and the third generation's fatal interest in polo playing. All of this has very little to do with the actual narrative, about a young Native American woman who finds reels of a long-lost Buffalo Bill film while clearing out the building.

More than half of the 11 stories in Bad Dirt are mere squibs, each only a few pages long, set in the fictional town of Elk Tooth, where regulars gather at a bar called Pee Wee's. Proulx borrows the voice of a barfly, retelling some fantastical local tall tales. In "The Hellhole," a Fish and Game warden finds that he can dispatch poachers to Hades via a magically appearing hole in the ground. A group of Elk Tooth men spend the winter in a beard-growing competition in "The Contest." In one puzzling piece, a badger is convinced he is the object of desire of a rancher's wife. Unfortunately Proulx is a terrible jokesmith -- she can't really figure out what to do with these thin conceits, and her punchlines drop like lead balloons.

With the exception of another half-baked tall tale (about a tea kettle that grants wishes), the remaining, longer stories concern the ways the country bests its inhabitants, both the old-timers and the newcomers -- who are, predictably, nearly always despised. The most substantial work here is "What Kind of Furniture Would Jesus Pick?," in which Proulx positions stubborn rancher Gilbert Wolfscale against the modern world. He tries to raise turkeys, but customers just like the supermarket brands. His frustrated wife leaves the wind-bitten ranch, and his growing children have no interest in coming around to visit ("It stinks out there," they complain, "there's nothin a do"). His elderly mother sinks her savings into a mail scam, and Gilbert is left to pay her funeral expenses. One of his sons is gay. Despite these Job-like burdens, it's not easy to muster up much sympathy for Gilbert. We're given little access to his interior world: A briefly sketched childhood memory of watching men working on the county road is all that explains his bond with the place. We're told he loves his ranch, but we're not offered any way to feel it.

Proulx is not kind to her Wyomingites. Their faces are grotesque: One character's "contained enough material for two faces: a high brow, a long chin, wide cheekbones with fleshy cheeks like vehicle headrests, and a nose like a plowshare." Another's "face was so oily it seemed metaled. . . . She had a spit-frilled way of talking." They have ridiculous names -- Creel Zmundzinksi, Cheri Wham, Frank Frink, Sedley Alwen.

Throughout Bad Dirt, Proulx stacks the deck against her characters. She makes them crusty, mean or relentlessly shallow, then heaps on endless indignities. "The Wamsutter Wolf" savors the description of a broken-down trailer existence: "It stank of cigarettes, garbage, and feces. . . . On the floor several feathers were stuck in a coagulated blob. Wads of trodden gum appeared as archipelagos in a mud-colored sea while bits of popcorn, string ends, torn paper, a crushed McDonald's cup, and candy wrappers made up the flotsam." The details of redneck life -- dirty diapers, stale pink cakes, outrageous flatulence -- continue for pages. Proulx seems to have little affection for the upper-middle-class couple, Brooklynites come to settle in Wyoming, at the center of "Man Crawling Out of Trees." From the story's first sentence, she cuts them no slack: "Mitchell Fair and his wife, Eugenie, sped over the whiskey-colored plains in their aging Infiniti, 'cutting prairie,' said Mitchell under his breath, thinking it sounded western." Proulx is a strange kind of puppeteer, cackling at the misfortunes of her creations. But if an author has no love for her characters, why should the reader?

Reviewed by Peter Terzian
Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

From Bookmarks Magazine
No one can avoid comparing Bad Dirt to its predecessor; critics uniformly lauded Close Range for its inventive language and sober themes. This time around, Proulx employs straightforward prose to describe her characters’ often foolish hopes and dreams. Several reviewers praise the sequel for its forays into magical realism and portraits of Western yokels. It’s still bleak, but there is more laughter this time. One story ("What Kind of Furniture Would Jesus Pick?") makes even the most cynical critic take notice.

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

Customer Reviews

a fine follow-up to "close range"
I greatly enjoyed Proulx' Close Range collection of short stories,
and Bad Dirt (subtitled "Wyoming Stories 2") is a very worthy
encore. The Close Range stories gave a wonderful flavor to the
rural areas of the state, the people, the land, the warm and the
rough sides, both past and present. Some of the stories were
humorous, others were harrowing, some were a whimsical mix. You'll
find just the same mix (and a bit more) in Bad Dirt. You start off
with a 12-page story about Game & Fish Warden Creel Zmundzinski (who
turns up again in a couple of more stories) that begins in a nice
straightforward fashion, and then takes off into a kind of
humorous Proulx-Stephen King joint venture (or perhaps
Proulx-King-Carl Hiaassen).

Several stories center on the residents and the 3 bars in the tiny
town of Elk City: I very much like reading another of Proulx'
short stories when I feel that I already know the characters well
(one of these is a kind of Proulx-Hiaassen mix involving rental
alligators--it sounds bizarre, but the story works in a truly
delightful way).

The best of the stories is The Wamsutter Wolf, and runs about 35
pages. Buddy Millar lives in a $40/month rental housetrailer
5 miles out from the center of a small boomtown (almost all
trailers). You don't get much for your $40 a month. His only
neighbors live close by in an even grungier trailer--a bully who
beat him up in high school, his wife and passel of grungy young
kids, one of whom is a 4-year-old alcoholic (his father believes
that learning to drink young avoids the problems that come with
learning later). This is a horrifying and harrowing story--
stronger than anything I remember in Close Range. It's very
tough, utterly realistic, and it left me wanting to see it
expanded to about 300 pages as a novel.

Annie Proulx and William Gay (I Hate To See The Evening Sun Go
Down) are the two best short-story writers I've read in many
years--and both write excellent novels as well.

It's good, but....
Didn't like it as much as At Close Range. The stories seems less inspired, a little more flippant, a little less likely to grab you, shake you, scratch you, bite you, gouge you than the former collection. Still very well written, and more engaging that most stuff I pick up on a whim or obtain on recommendation from friends or family. Oh - I'm a Wyoming native, I live on the family ranch outside Saratoga (look it up on a map!), and trust me, the other reviews from us 'Pokes are right - these stories (and At Close Range) actually are pretty durn close to Wyoming then and now (especially the geography and landscapes, the climate, the damn WIND, and the very necessary self-reliance of most folks), although I'd have to say your average WY native is maybe just a little bit less colorful and probably a little bit more of a warm, caring, educated person (though we have more than our share of Proulx characters).

Proulx dishes the dirt on her neighbors
This volume of stories about Wyoming contains four fully developed, character-driven short stories interspersed with what feels like seven thinly disguised local anecdotes. Yet in both kinds of stories Proulx demonstrates a Faulkner-like skill at portraying agrarian locals coming head-to-head with modernity. The final (anecdotal) story, "Florida Rental", especially reminded me of Faulkner's "Spotted Horses" sequence from The Snopes Trilogy. And like Faulkner, Proulx seems to have an underlying affection (or at least respect) for all her characters, even the ones she seems to enjoy skewering.

The substantial stories that I enjoyed are: "The Indian Wars Refaught" about a troubled young Sioux woman who reconnects with her sense of identity while sorting archival material related to the battle of Wounded Knee; "What Kind of Furniture Would Jesus Pick?," about one Wyoming rancher's decline in the face of changing times, a failed marriage, and sons who've gone their own ways; "Man Crawling Out of Trees" about an elderly couple who moved to Wyoming from the East and how each of them responds in radically different ways to the rugged terrain, taciturn populace, and sense of isolation; "The Wamsutter Wolf" in which the human characters are eerily shown to behave according to wolf pack mores. Of all the stories, these four come closest to matching the standard Proulx set for herself with "Brokeback Mountain." Also worth mentioning here is "Dump Junk," a story that interestingly moves beyond Proulx's very grounded sense of reality into the realm of fantasy.

All in all, this is a pretty satisfying collection of stories.