decemberthirty: (moon and shooting star)
I finished Annie Proulx's Close Range about a week ago, and haven't had a chance to sit down and write about it until now. And now that I am sitting down to write about it, I find that I don't really know what to say. I think it's a good book in many ways, but I didn't enjoy the experience of reading it. If Gilead was a case of just the right book at the right time, Close Range was the opposite. It was too grim, its view of life too bleak and unremitting, and I was stretched too thin last week; I knew that the stress of grad school applications and the loneliness of a week all by myself had exhausted my emotional reserves, so I couldn't let the book in, couldn't let it really affect me.

There were quite a few aspects of the book that I could appreciate despite my inability to get emotionally involved. Proulx's writing is littered with perfect turns of phrase, and she tells her stories with an economy that I could never hope to match. Her sense of place is strong; the brutal Wyoming landscape plays a vital role in just about all the stories in the collection, its hard soil and crushing winters shaping the lives and spirits of the ranchers, rodeo riders, and wannabe cowboys who populate these tales.

The best story in the book is certainly "Brokeback Mountain"--that story alone would make the collection worthwhile--but I elected not to read it this time. I remember all too well the way it broke my heart when I read it a year ago, and given that I felt like I was fighting off a nervous breakdown for most of last week, it didn't seem wise to put myself through that particular wringer again. Even without "Brokeback Mountain," however, there is plenty here that's great. I loved "The Mud Below," a story about a bull rider named Diamond Felts that cuts back and forth between the physically grinding existence of a rodeo performer and the hopelessness of the home life that drove him to that existence. "The Blood Bay" is another great story, standing out from the rest of the collection by virtue of its gruesome humor. She attempts a sort of western magical realism in a few stories, and these are less successful.

There are other stories in the collection that may have been great, but by the time I was halfway through it had become too much. Too much loneliness, too much bad luck, too much slow wearing down of people. I couldn't absorb it. I would put the book down for long stretches between stories and I felt very little impulse to pick it up again. Perhaps it would be better to read these stories one at a time, in between other things. I remember a few of them from when they ran in The New Yorker in the late '90s, and I recall really liking them then, so maybe that would have been a better way to do it. I don't know. Maybe I'll revisit some of these stories at a later date, but maybe I won't...

[If anyone is concerned by my references to nervous breakdowns and a lack of emotional reserves, I would like to note that I'm doing much better now. Nothing like a little Christmas and time with my vast extended family to restore some of my equilibrium.]
decemberthirty: (johnny)
I finished Winesburg, Ohio last night. It was, as predicted, a very interesting book, yet I found it hard to fully engage with the book. The narrative tone is so detached, so far above the level of the action it describes, and I found that difficult. As the book went on, I began to feel that the narrative voice was a character in its own right, an actual narrator rather than just a tone or voice, one that stays aloof from the residents of the town and passes judgment on everything they think and do. I wanted to identify with the characters, to see them as human beings, but the narrator wanted me to see them as squalid. In the end I couldn't agree--they're not squalid; they harbor their secret desires, they make their mistakes and suffer for them, but they're no different and certainly no worse than any of us--and I think that fundamental disagreement prevented me from really loving the book. Nonetheless, there were aspects of the book that I liked quite a bit. I liked the way the book gave me a real, full sense of the world of this town: its insignificance in the larger world, its centrality in the lives of its inhabitants. I liked the way the stories built on each other, each of them adding more depth to the others than any of them would have had individually. In a similar vein, the stories I liked best were the ones that were most closely connected to each other, particularly those involving the strange love triangle of George Willard, Kate Swift, and Reverend Hartman. There was a power in that episode that was missing from most of the rest of the book. At times I liked the spareness of Anderson's style, although at other times I didn't.

As for the themes of secret-keeping and repression, they're quite prominent in this book although I'm not sure how much Anderson's treatment of repression relates to my own. He sure is good at revealing the ways in which people go about locked up inside their own heads, but somehow it's not evocative enough for me. I want something that handles these subjects with both greater subtlety and greater emotion than Anderson achieves.

I'm perpetually reading short stories in and around and among everything else that I read, and I don't usually bother posting about them unless I read an entire collection of them at once. Or unless I read something really exceptional, which I did last night. "Brokeback Mountain" by Annie Proulx. I've had Close Range on my to-read list for a while, and I will read the rest of the book soon, but I'm going to see Brokeback Mountain the movie tomorrow (Ms. E, who is leaving for California this weekend, and who knows me well, said, "You'll just go see it without me if I try to make you wait."), so I figured I had better hurry up and read the story. And was I ever glad I did. So terse and blunt and heartbreaking! God. I could never even dream of writing something like that. It was just one perfectly dead-on scene after another and then, all too soon, it was over. I'm just blown away by it.

And yes, I am very much looking forward to the movie. It's not like me to get so excited about a movie--that's usually Ms. E's role--but I swear there has never been a movie more perfectly tailored to me than this one. Not only is it a tragedy about cowboys, but gay cowboys. And not just gay cowboys, but gay cowboys scripted by Larry McMurtry! Oh my. While it would have been just wrong, wrong, wrong for Gus and Call's relationship to have been sexualized, or for Pea Eye to have harbored a secret crush on Dish Boggett, or even for Sonny and Duane to have shared a fumbling and undiscussed encounter, I have great confidence in Larry McMurtry's ability to adapt this story and retain its essence on film. Yes indeed, I really can't wait for this one. The fact that I expect it to be completely and totally hot doesn't hurt either.
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