Bad Dirt: Wyoming Stories 2

I loved these stories. They’re great if you like to read stories about normal people — who are sometimes desperate or tragic in very human ways — on ranches.

Though this is only the second book I've read by Annie Proulx, I can tell that her style and voice will keep me coming back for more and more of her work. Proulx blends the utterly fantastic with the totally mundane so seamlessly that she can pass virtually anything off in her writing and you'll accept it as commonplace. Her characters seem completely well rounded in this collection, even when the stories are brief, and she compels you to care about them, though many of them are not what I would describe as "likable." Just as she describes the state, her stories seem to be about nothing particularly special, yet you find yourself drawn into them and fascinated by their potential. Proulx does not disappoint. ~Scott William Foley, author of The Imagination's Provocation: Volume II: A Collection of Short Stories

I've read Annie Proulx's earlier collection of Wyoming Stories (Close Range -- see my review of it if you'd like) and found this collection equally masterfully written. Even as I get absorbed in each story, I can stand back and just admire the skill of using words to paint pictures of people and places. Amazing! These stories struck me as being more cheeky than the Close Range stories -- not quite as poignant, but more toward the funny side. But the tall-tale, mythical quality is still there, as is the spot-on description of the dusty, harsh, and utterly beautiful star of the book -- Wyoming -- and the dusty, harsh, and utterly beautiful people who dare to call it home. We meet all kinds: crusty ranchers, ex-urbanites, oil and gas workers, mountain men, wildlife agents. Their lives intertwine within and between stories until the whole collection becomes one larger-than-life whole. I got this book from the library, but liked it so much that it might be one that I'll actually add to my collection. I can't recommend it highly enough -- go get it today!

These stories range from mildly funny to utterly bizarre, and as I savored each tidbit I could barely wait for more. Heck, this was worth reading just to get acquianted with folks with names as Runyonesque as can be. The whole assemblage ends up with the flavor of modern fairy tales; in the end, a lesson is learned, good wins over evil, the prince & princess live happily ever after. Sort of, in a crooked way. I liked the connectivity, the fact that because I'd read about a character in one story I already had the inside scoop on him or her as played out in a subsequent tale. And of course the "character" of Wyoming plays out across the whole book. This book is a good summer read.

Annie Proulx tickles me. I loved "Shipping News" for its mix of quirky characters, dark humor, sentiment, sheer scariness, and the impact of an isolated and starkly beautiful landscape. Much of this shows up again in her short stories set in Wyoming, where isolation and economic contingencies tend to get a strangle hold on the people who live there. The tough survive OK, but only by fierce determination and good luck, of which there is scarcely enough to go around. The stories range from brief comic interludes, existing sometimes chiefly for the sake of a punch line ("The Old Badger Game" and "Summer of the Hot Tubs"), to humorous yarns about colorful local characters ("The Trickle Down Effect"), to longer accounts of people up against unwelcome circumstances with every potential of crushing them. The marriage of a retired New York couple in a massive log house on a ranchette starts to crumble under the pressure of a Wyoming winter ("Man Crawling Out of Trees"). A 4th-generation rancher is squeezed into a desperate corner by rising costs, falling prices, coalbed methane drilling, and a disintegrated family ("What Kind of Furniture Would Jesus Pick?"). A hundred years of Wyoming history are compressed into a story about the fortunes of a wealthy polo-playing family, the empty shell of which is invaded by descendants of the massacred at Wounded Knee ("The Indian Wars Refought"). And finally, in my favorite story of the bunch, a young man trying to pull his life back together finds himself in a nightmarish situation involving a violent neighbor ("The Wamsutter Wolf"). This one had me sitting up past my bedtime, wide-eyed in the night and heart pounding. The tone of the stories varies with the publication they were written for, and these range from The New Yorker to the literary quarterlies, to Playboy. Once you get over that, you can settle back and just let Proulx pull out whatever stops she cares to, to create one heck of a read - and one right after another. Readers who enjoy her broadly humorous Elk Tooth stories will enjoy Robert Welsch's comic collection, "It's Not the End of the Earth, But You Can See It From Here," set in fictional Centralia, Nebraska.

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.