Gardener

                      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,