by Annie Proulx
Fourth Estate, 221pp, £14.99FEW CAN WRITE ABOUT MAN'S relationship with his environment quite as superbly as Annie Proulx, and this latest collection of short stories that return her to the Wyoming of Brokebac
k Mountain only enhances that already glittering reputation. Proulx is not one to try different things, or step out of her range – she knows where she's comfortable. But, surprisingly, that comfort zone never condemns her writing to some cosy past-time, lacking any kind of edge.
On the contrary, sticking close to home, both in style and content, only seems to have made Proulx more edgy. And more angry, too. The Devil features in two of these short stories, the hellish autocrat presiding over the usual adulterers, con-artists, killers, with more than a few merchant bankers and heads of global corporations thrown in for good measure. There's even a fashion designer or two (I doubt Manolo Blahnik will take kindly to a room specially reserved for him in eternity, along with all his shoes made for him in his own size? Doubtless many an actress and model made to totter along on his foot-warping creations will have had similar revenge fantasies). One short story about the Devil might get things off your chest; but two? Something else is going on here.
It may be that the Devil barely needs two stories to make his presence felt. Proulx has always had a great respect for nature and the power it wields. From the late 19th-century to the present day, dashes of sentiment slice through the hard lifestyle of people without money or education to soften the blows for them. In "Them Old Cowboy Songs", young Archie weeps over his new wife's desire for him because he "ain't never been loved". In "The Great Divide", the sadistic Fenk speaks in whispers, the result apparently, of trying to hang himself as a boy. "'They get awful moody at a certain age,' his mother had offered as explanation, but his old father knew it was probably something else on the other edge of the great divide that separated men's and women's knowledge of sexual matters."
Proulx doesn't hint or insinuate, she's too bold a writer for that, but she encourages and nurtures intimacy in her work, giving us just a glimpse into why a middle-aged man masks his high-pitched voice with a whispering tone, or explaining in a line why a quiet young woman is drawn to a hapless young boy. It's a kind of economy that pays respect to that intimacy, because it recalls and mirrors perfectly the relationship between men and women and their environment. No word is wasted in Proulx's world, either on the page or between men and women, because the environment around them won't stand for it. There is too much, always, at stake, for Proulx's characters. Their relationship with the land is the ultimate relationship: it damages them, kills them, changes their lives forever. The landscape is a lover in these tales; Proulx is the chronicler of the most intense, and most extreme, kind of love stories.
The closeness between her theme and her style is unnerving, too. There is a delicious kind of embrace going on in a page that is full of words like "broom-tails", "bunchgrass", "rose-haw", "pronghorn", "skillet". All the time, Proulx is reminding us of some kind of primeval connection between us, language and the environment – in her prehistoric tale, "Deep-Blood-Greasy-Bowl", language has barely even happened yet but memory is the mode of communication between the bison hunters. And in "Testimony of the Donkey", stubborn Catlin, who has rowed with her lover and gone off on a dangerous trail alone and without any way to communicate back home, finds herself trapped and injured, at the mercy of the elements, which tease and torture her in equal measure. Dying, she hears the hobnail boots of her lover along the granite trail, coming to rescue her at last, and can only howl his name, "a thick and primeval sound".
Ashes to ashes and dust to dust: we all return to the earth, Proulx is telling us, and that's something we seem to have forgotten, either willfully or accidentally. In a perfect demonstration of how small stories can bloom into universal themes reminding us of our humanity and how fragile it is, Proulx has once again done the art of writing proud. I can't imagine a more profound, and extraordinarily written, collection of stories this year.
The full article contains 770 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
