Word: proulx
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...Shipping News by E. Annie Proulx. Winner of this year's National Book Award, Proulx's rambunctious second novel zeroes in on a coastal Newfoundland community coming apart economically and socially when the fishing and seal hunting industries fail. The author has a sharp ear for regional speech and a barbed and quirky style that can be both startling and humorous...
...some years Proulx (rhymes with true), 69, has been a virtuoso chronicler of Wyoming's beleaguered ranchlands and the sinewy characters who insist on inhabiting them, generally in the face of good evidence that it would be a wise idea to move on. She covered this territory for the first time in Close Range, a magnificent 1999 collection of short stories. Now comes Bad Dirt: Wyoming Stories 2 (Scribner; 219 pages), another terse, twisty and entertaining assemblage...
...Proulx's Wyoming is a hard-pressed place. Baked into desert by chronic drought, poisoned by toxic runoff from mining operations and chopped and diced into real estate, it's forever verging on the uninhabitable. "The country wanted to go to sand dunes and rattlesnakes," she writes, "wanted to scrape off its human ticks." All the same, most of the 11 stories in this book are lighter in tone than those in Close Range, a book that took regular plunges into awe and dread. In a supernatural shaggy-dog story like The Hellhole, about a game warden who discovers...
Throughout the book, Proulx does a matchless job of summing up the human comedy of a modern West in which the cowboys are apt to pull up stakes to go to UCLA film school. She also likes to traverse whole decades in the space of a paragraph or two, as though to say that from the long mineral perspective of the Western soil and sky, sizable stretches of the 20th century might very well slide by in parentheses. It's the kind of perspective that comes with...
SHORT STORIES: Alice Munro and Annie Proulx are golden...