Humanity Oozing Sin Like Pus
Here's a book review I published about 15 years ago in an obscure online journal the name of which I have long since forgotten. I know it's sort of long, but it's a good review of a powerful book. As they say in poker, "read it and weep."
Proulx, Annie. Close
Range: Wyoming Stories. New York: Scribner, 1999. (283 pages, $25.00)
This is a collection of stories
about “the damned human race” (to use Twain’s phrase). The Wyoming world that
Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Annie Proulx creates here is so bleak, so
dismal, so unflinchingly harsh, and yet so powerfully evoked that my response
each time I completed another story (I read one long story a night till I
finished the book) was to shudder and ask myself why I continued to read.
But I did continue, drawn, I think,
by the power of the storyteller and a hope for hope. One of these stories, I said to myself, will
reveal at least a hint of kindness, a glimmer of grace, or at the very least, a
moment of gentleness. And finally, near
the end of the collection, I was rewarded, but ever so briefly.
Of course anyone who has read
Proulx’s The Shipping News, Accordion
Crimes, or Heart Songs and Other
Stories would know better than to expect in Close Range cheery tales of cowpokes singing folk songs around the
campfire. But these stories are even
darker than her earlier works. Diamond,
a young rodeo bull rider in the story “The Mud Below,” was rejected by a father
who would not claim him and a mother who tells him he cost her “everything.” He
has become like one of the bulls he rides, a mean, sexual predator who is ready
to inflict pain at a moment’s notice.
Near the end of the story, his young body broken and his heart emptied
of any hope, he compares life “to the ranch hand, bent over a calf, slitting
the scrotal sac. The course of life’s
events seemed slower than the knife but not less thorough. . . . It was all a hard fast ride that ended in the
mud.”
In story after story, I saw brutal
men--and women. In “A Lonely Coast” the
terribly intense Josanna Skiles (like a “house on fire in the night that you
could only watch”) shot at her husband when they broke up, creasing his
shoulder. According to the unnamed first
person narrator of the story, she also shot and killed her boyfriend in the confusion
of a car accident/ road-rage incident because he had been flirting with her
friend: “I think Josanna seen her chance and taken it. Friend, it’s easier than you think to yield
up to the dark impulse.”
The shortest story in the book, less than a page
long, begins with Rancher Croom jumping off a cliff. We then see his wife who is cutting a hole in
the attic where she finds what she has suspected: her husband’s paramours,
“some desicated as jerky and much the same color, some moldy from lying beneath
the roof leaks.” “People in Hell Just
Want a Drink of Water” is a tale of two families–the Dunmires and the
Tinsleys. The Tinsley’s son Ras runs
away at sixteen, is nearly killed in a car wreck years later, and eventually
returns home, terribly mutilated and unable to talk. (“There was a whistling hole in his throat
and a scarred left eye socket. His jaw
was deformed. Multiple breaks of one leg
had healed badly and he lurched and dragged.
Both hands seemed maimed, frozen joints and lopped fingers. He could not speak beyond a raw choke only
the devil could understand.”) His one
joy in life seems to be to ride his old horse through the country and expose
himself to girls and women. Eventually
the Dunmire boys castrate him with a dirty knife and he dies of blood
poisoning. The story is set in the
thirties and Proulx concludes it by saying, “Those hard days are finished. . .
. We are in a new millennium and such desperate things no longer happen.
“If you believe that you’ll believe
anything.”
Almost
every story contains horrors such as these and in many cases the brutality
displayed is traced back to a childhood in which the character is abused in
some way. But the brutality comes not
only from the genes or the home; it seems to grow out of the harsh Wyoming setting.
In any time period, Wyoming is droughts, blizzards, lots of rocks and mountains
and very little fertile soil. But modern
Wyoming is
disturbed land, uranium
mines, coal mines, trona mines, pump jacks and drilling rigs, clear-cuts, tank
farms, contaminated rivers, pipelines, methanol-processing plants, ruinous
dams, the Amoco mess, railroads . . . the old ranches bought up by country
music stars and assorted billionaires acting roles in some imaginary cowboy
revue, the bleed-out of brains and talent, and for common people no jobs and a
tough life in a trailer house. It was a
97,000 square-mile dog’s breakfast of outside exploiters, Republican ranchers
and scenery.
The brutal environment, the abused
land, and the historical struggle to survive, along with, I suppose, the basic
nastiness of humankind produce a citizenry that perpetuates brutality. Children hear only harsh words from their
parents; husbands speak indifferently to wives and wives to husbands, sex is
hard and quick, something a man takes.
But, as I noted earlier, a couple of glimmers of grace can be seen. In “The Governors of Wyoming” the central
plot focuses on a saboteur brought in to do harm to the cattle ranches because
their cattle are destroying the land. As
a small foil to this plot we meet the Birch family, who are farming “for the
long run,” and have decided to try to restore the land with various sustainable
farming techniques, not concerning themselves with profits. We first meet Skipper, one of the Birch men, as
he is gently braiding his aged mother’s hair at dawn. It is a lovely scene, made more significant
by the realization that years earlier Skipper lost two small children when they
climbed in the trunk of the family car and suffocated. He has been sustained for many years by the
metaphysical poetry of the Puritan poet Edward Taylor. And so in the midst of this Wyoming
brutality, we see, for a moment, goodness and even grace.
When I finished the book, I asked
myself again why I read it. Was it worth
my time and energy? I can’t give an easy
answer. For years, I have criticized
novelists like Grace Livingstone Hill and Jeanette Oke for their sentimental
portrayal of reality. A work of art must reveal truth, and these sentimental
novelists try to create a world in which most of the ugliness and pain in the
world is dispatched with the quick fix of some God talk. But what do we do with a novel that has
virtually no hope, no love, and no goodness?
Hardy, Hemingway, Steinbeck–all give us scenes of love or personal
fidelity or hilarity in the midst of the bleakness of their worlds. What do we
do with a novelist who shows us only pain and grief and cruelty and
despair? I know I cannot expect Annie
Proulx to agree with Katherine Patterson who suggests that while happy endings
are not truthful endings, neither are hopeless endings. If an excess of happiness and optimism is
untruthful, can the same be said for an excess of cruelty and despair?
That’s a hard question to
answer. Surely, Proulx is a far better writer
than Jeanette Oke.
Proulx
just plain knocks you off your feet with her writing: Her characters are startlingly real, the
Wyoming terrain is drawn with brutal fidelity, the dialogue and the dialects
are always right on key. And while it is true that there is no hope in her
world, it is also true that a strong sense of “this is not the way things are
supposed to be” emerges from her stories.
Faithful to her vision of reality,
she looks with steely eyes at a humanity oozing sin like pus, and she paints it
as she sees it. She makes me see it and
feel it far more profoundly than any newspaper or talk show or trendy novel
can. Yet there is no voyeuristic
wallowing in the bizarre or the horrific.
Reading Close Range, I know
that (paraphrasing Matthew Arnold) I have touched powerfully on life at some points.
Still I want to say with Patterson
that hopeless endings are not true endings.
Most of the lives of the people who live in my community are not
hopeless. The people I know are loving parents and spouses, busy in church and
community working for the betterment of others.
They buy girl scout cookies, attend their kids’ ball games and concerts,
sing in church choirs, take care of their aging parents, tutor children with
reading and math problems. Sometimes their marriages fall apart or their kids
rebel or their choir sings off key, but usually they pick things up and make a
life. Many of them look to a future
where all things will be made whole.
Proulx, apparently, does not know
any of these people–or if she does, she does not see fit to people her
fictional world with them. Because of
this her fiction is not quite true to the reality I know. Nevertheless, I will take the pity and horror
she evokes in me and, secure in my faith in a sovereign God, continue to read
her stories of life in a sin-skewed world.
Just getting caught up on the blog today, Dave. Thanks for your thoughts on this book, although I do not think I will be able to read it. I find I cannot read stories of such unbearable sadness and despair any more as it affects my spirit. I like your assessment: hopeless endings are just as unrealistic as happy endings. Life is certainly a mixture of both. Emily Kramer
ReplyDelete