My favorite story in Annie Proulx's collection Close Range is "The Mud Below," about a bullrider named Diamond Felts. (In a collection where characters have names like Car Scrope and Aladdin Touhey, "Diamond Felts" is basically Jack Smith.) Diamond comes from a family with higher expectations than bullriding, though as Wyomingites they're familiar enough that Diamond's mother can take him to see an old bullrider whose brain was turned to soup decades earlier by one bad fall. But Diamond will not be moved; his embrace of bullriding is a kind of middle finger to those expectations, and expectations of all kind. It's no coincidence that his childhood nickname is "Shorty": bullriding is a way of making himself a big man, at least for a little while. To underscore this point, Proulx describes with upsetting clarity how Diamond rapes his friend's wife in the backseat of their car. Women are like bulls to Diamond, like everything else: something to be mastered for as long as you can.
One thing Close Range is not is a "love letter to Wyoming." Though there's affection here for the landscapes and sympathy for the state's pioneers, ranchers, cowboys, and down-and-outs, Proulx's vision of Wyoming is mostly that of a remote outpost where people quickly grow desocialized and impotent. They lash out, like Diamond, or the rancher from "The Governors of Wyoming" (quoted above) who secretly works alongside an environmental activist to sabotage the fences of the neighbors. Or else they simply burn up, like the hard-drinking waitress of "A Lonely Coast." These stories are nasty, none moreso perhaps than "People in Hell Just Want a Drink of Water," about a young man in a terrible railroad accident whose brain damage makes him expose himself to women, and the pioneer chuds who are all too happy to use such indiscretions as an excuse to shoot somebody or cut them up. This story is set in the 19th century, but Proulx seems to suggest that things have changed little since then.
The stories in Close Range are often very complex, like mini-novels, and in my experience each one took ten or fifteen pages just to sort of understand the basic outline of what was going on. Sometimes this is frustrating, and other times she uses it to great effect. But I think it's instructive that the strongest stories in the collection have a real singularity of purpose, like "The Mud Below" and the collection's most well-known story, "Brokeback Mountain." The gay cowboys of "Brokeback" barely have the inner resources to understand the feelings they share for each other, and to the extent they're able to articulate them, it is to express a (justified) fear that they're putting their lives in danger. A happy ending is disclosed from the very start, because it just isn't possible in this Wyoming--that, at least, is something the pair understand. Like most of the other stories, it's bleak and cynical, but has an honest ring to it, and that's an improvement, I think, on the twee-ness of The Shipping News, the only other thing I've read by Proulx. The title, Close Range, suggests multiple possible meanings: the opposite of an "Open Range," that is, the closing of the myth of the Wyoming cowboy--but also the distance across which a bullet might hit you in the gut.
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