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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.]
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.]
