Ain't No Home Sweet Home (Close Range: Brokeback Mountain and Other Stories)

A little over a year ago, I was lucky enough to go to a premiere of Brokeback Mountain at the Santa Fe Film Festival. I was even luckier still that the screenwriters Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana were there to say a few words about the experience of scripting such an exceptional film. Of course, they praised the original piece of work that the screenplay was developed from--a short story by Annie Proulx.

Before readuing Close Range: Brokeback Mountain and Other Stories, my only other experience of Annie Proulx was The Shipping News, which I read at least six years ago. At the time, I remember finding the prose challenging and not being entirely taken by the story, which was set in Newfoundland. It was only after I saw the adapted film version of the novel (starring Kevin Spacey and Julianne Moore) that I realised the research and vision that had been attached to this book.

Close Range is a collection of 11 short stories that explores the lives, loves and losses of the ordinary people (cowboys, housewives and country folk) of Wyoming, where Proulx has lived since 1994. Most of these stories appeared in various magazines (The New Yorker, The Atlantic, GQ) before the publication of this collection. The overall tone of the book is resigned--quiet desperation in the face of hard work and uneventful days--but Proulx's astute exposition makes this surrender beautiful and particularly relevant to the world we live in today.

In fact, Elton John and Bernie Taupin's 'American Triangle' played incessantly in my head while I was reading this book, the chorus creating the perfect soundtrack for Proulx's prose:

'Western skies' don't make it right

'Home of the brave' don't make no sense

I've seen a scarecrow wrapped in wire

Left to die on a high ridge fence

It's a cold, cold wind

It's a cold, cold wind

It's a cold wind blowing, Wyoming

The overall themes of sexuality, tradition and escape help Proulx paint a picture of modern Wyoming that would be difficult to emulate in any other form, while the irony and often morbid humour entertain. Brokeback Mountain sits at the end of the anthology like an encore and, indeed it is, but other stories, particularly People in Hell Just Want a Drink of Water, are just as deserving of praise and acclaim.

Annie Proulx did not write her first novel until the age of 56 and now, at the age of 71, has been billed as 'maybe the best writer in America' by the Independent on Sunday.

Does she deserve this accolade?

As a Wyoming rancher might say, 'Does milk come from a cow?'