CLOSE RANGE, by Annie Proulx

Well, that's it. CLOSE RANGE firmly establishes Annie Proulx as one of my favorite authors. Why did this take three books to confirm? Because I mostly liked The Shipping News and I really liked Accordian Crimes, and I wasn't sure how all that averaged out, even when one figured in how much I liked "Brokeback Mountain" (a lot--"Brokeback Mountain" is one of the short stories included in CLOSE RANGE. I read "Brokeback" last summer, and only just now sat down to the rest of the stories). CLOSE RANGE brings it all together, and yes, ranks Proulx high on my scale of favorites.

The short stories in CLOSE RANGE all focus on the state of Wyoming, and are told with a sense of eerie, dark humor that is fascinating--without being perverse or excessive. Her writing is beautiful, seemingly effortless, and some of her simplest sentences stunned me into reading them aloud, including this one, from "The Bunchgrass Edge of the World":

Old Red in his pantry wished for deafness when the bedsprings sang above.

It's a beautiful sentence, even out of context. Some of my favorite stories include both "Brokeback" and "Bunchgrass," but also "The Blood Bay" (which made me laugh, and read the whole thing aloud to Mitch) and "Pair a Spurs."

There's something of Flannery O'Connor in the way Proulx tells a story--though the West is to Proulx what the South is to O'Connor--as well as something fluid and seemless in the way she writes. Proulx is brilliant, quite brilliant, and I can't wait to read another of her novels.

RATING: 5

Book Review: BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN, by Annie Proulx

In true Thea form, I've been putting off watching the movie Brokeback Mountain until I've had a chance to read the story. Once it was brought to my attention that the story was by one of my favorite authors (Annie Proulx) and the movie screenplay by another (Larry McMurtry), and that the movie starred one of my favorite actors (Jake Gyllenhaal), I was sold. And I was very curious to see what all the fuss was about.

BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN is a short story, but it is so intense and so weighty that it does not sacrifice impact for the sake of brevity, not in the least. In fact, I was so emotionally involved with the characters (who were, let's face it, quite emotionally involved with each other) by the end of thirty pages that I could've sworn I'd been reading for much, much longer. Proulx is just that brilliant.

And her writing? Whew. Beautiful. Just right. Does justice to a tough topic. Simultaneously tender and aggressive.

And one of the things I love most about Annie Proulx? Well. I get a bit tetchy when a book is obviously written by a woman--in the extreme, think fluff novels where the main character is savvy and sassy in her slingback heels, juggling careers and boyfriends and so on--or obviously written by a man (with the exception of the marvellous Dashiell Hammett--I do really like him, gunslingers, trashy dames, and all). The books that I love best are generally written by authors who can write a complete and convincing character of the opposite sex and do them justice: think Flaubert, and his notorious Madame Bovary. Or Zadie Smith and her old war buddies in White Teeth. I weary sometimes of seeing women authors write primarily about women, or men write primarily of men (I love Barbara Kingsolver, but she is a bit guilty of this; with a few exceptions, so is Ian McEwan. Atonement is just such an exception).

And so I am delighted when I encounter a woman author who writes convincingly of not just men, but of cowhands, of solitary widowers hitting midlife in a bad way; of generations upon generations of homesteaders, bartenders, immigrants and tradesmen. Also, she writes some fascinating women. She's just good, and in her hands, the story of Jack Twist and Ennis del Mar is given wonderful, if rough, treatment.

Now I have no excuse. I really must see the movie.

RATING: 3

Book Review: ACCORDIAN CRIMES, by Annie Proulx

You're probably familiar with Annie Proulx's stories, if not her name--after all, she wrote the short story that Brokeback Mountain was based on. She wrote (and won a Pulitzer for) the novel The Shipping News, which has also been made into a movie. Now, before I get into ACCORDIAN CRIMES, I want to say a word or two about The Shipping News, which I read and sort of liked, or didn't really like, or appreciated certain aspects of at certain times, but mostly found depressing in the heaviest, most lead-weight-upon-my-shoulders sort of way, and ultimately would say that Proulx's writing knocked my socks off but goodness, could she please lighten up a little.

ACCORDIAN CRIMES, published something like nine years after The Shipping News (there were other books published in between, but I've yet to read them), took all my favorite aspects of Shipping, polished them up, gave them a fantastic story to tell and let 'em loose.

Following a little green two-row accordian through its arrival in America, in the hands of of its Italian maker, and through all of its successive owners, Proulx offers a lovely framework for telling of America's beginnings through the polkas, waltzes and zydeco tunes of German, Polish, Mexican, Norwegian, Cajun, French, Irish (and more) immigrants. For each culture, the accordian is a rememberance of home, a way of connecting briefly with whatever land the immigrants have left behind.

There are two things about ACCORDIAN CRIMES that stand out to me most:
1) The racism, the blatant hostility that arises between the immigrants (the Germans hate the Irish, the Americans hate everybody and everybody hates the blacks).
2) The wildly creative ways that Proulx comes up with to kill off characters. I began to get a little excited toward the end of each chapter to see how she'd knock off this guy.
Okay, well, really there are 3) things. Proulx's Pulitzer-worthy prose. I loved that.

RATING: 4

Book Review: GIGI, by Collette

My copy of GIGI is approximately three inches square, and fifty-three pages long. I read it in a single afternoon, as a respite from the violent and creative deaths of E. Annie Proulx's characters (Accordian Crimes) and to give myself a brief bit of distance from Accordian so that I might return refreshed and with a new perspective, and so not miss a single beat of Proulx's stellar prose.

GIGI is a perfect respite. The story moves quickly, regardless of the French drawing room setting, and it is both funny and biting. Each conversation between fifteen-(and a half)-year-old Gilberte and her socially-minded, ladylike aunts is so liberally salted with such critiques on Gilberte's form and mannerisms that it makes me grateful to live in such a blatantly unladylike time period. "Don't gesture," Aunt Alicia reprimands, "it makes you look common." "Don't eat too many almonds; they add weight to the breasts," and so on. They barrage Gilberte relentlessly with lessons in decorum and class, and somehow Gilberte manages to resist, in an innocent, childlike way, their social bullying.

This was my first encounter with Colette, and I enjoyed the book, very much. GIGI is a light read that packs a punch, and now I'm antsy to get back to Accordian Crimes and to the bookstore to purchase another of Colette's books.

RATING: 3