Word: closeness
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...inescapabble in Annie Proulx's unforgiving environments: the simple concurrences of wind and rain, cold and distance, render experiences unthinkably abhorrent and the crushingly sad not only possible but inevitable. She locates her stories, like her novels, in places where the difficulty of survival makes people poor and hard: Close Range: Wyoming Stories, Proulx's first collection of short stories in more than ten years, echoes 1988's collection Heartsongs in its unwavering gaze at human tragedy in nature's liminal spaces, where no quarter is asked and none given by protagonist, nature or narrator. It is this equanimity...
...Newfoundland, and the works which made her famous--Heartsongs, Postcards and The Shipping News--are more than simply rooted in those places: it is Proulx's firm belief, a belief that sometimes seems to verge on determinism, that geography inexorably shapes human behavior. She now lives in Wyoming, and Close Range is a collection which grows out of what Proulx understands as the essential spirit of Wyoming: almost no story in this collection goes by without murder or sudden violence, without rape or incest or (nearly always) adultery, Without man or woman being broken by the isolation and the struggle...
...important not to classify Proulx among the trendy and in general second-rate group of writers who are identified as "nature writers." Unmistakably, these stories are about people: indeed, it is that for stories which rely so heavily on the impact of environment on behavior, the Close Range stories spend such a small amount of time in actual description of the physical environment. Proulx' concern is the human consequences of the environment, which creeps into the stories and suffuses them with significance but never suffocates them. And in stories that address a limited geographical area and a limited range...
...Close Range's weakest stories, "Job History," "55 Miles to the Gas Pump" and "A Lonely Coast," the litaneous recurrence of tragedy does become uninteresting: one begins, at times, to wish for a hint of lives that are not being slowly ground down. But these are remarkably few weak points in a collection of 11 stories: and in stories like "The Half-Skinned Steer," "The Mud Below," and, most strikingly, "Brokeback Mountain," Proulx reasserts herself with a force that has grown and become refined since the fine Heartsongs collection. She has developed herself as a chronicler of memory...
...inescapabble in Annie Proulx's unforgiving environments: the simple concurrences of wind and rain, cold and distance, render experiences unthinkably abhorrent and the crushingly sad not only possible but inevitable. She locates her stories, like her novels, in places where the difficulty of survival makes people poor and hard: Close Range: Wyoming Stories, Proulx's first collection of short stories in more than ten years, echoes 1988's collection Heartsongs in its unwavering gaze at human tragedy in nature's liminal spaces, where no quarter is asked and none given by protagonist, nature or narrator. It is this equanimity...