Fine Just the Way It Is: Wyoming Stories 3 ( Wyoming Stories)

By Annie Proulx

Scribner 2008-10-05 Pages 240

By JENNY SOUTHLYNN

Annie Proulx‘s trilogy, Fine Just the Way It Is: Wyoming Stories 3, includes works that reflect on the hard edge of reality.

In this collection, the fulcrum is the harsh climate of Wyoming from frozen winters, to heat suffering springs and boiling summers. Characters, ranchers mostly, Proulx mines; sifting through the ravages of their daily lives revealing the meager means of their emotional and physical survival. In classic Proulx style, little is romanticized--all is grit and hardship, with occasional bouts of genuine black humor.

Proulx’s writes with understated passion, hard boiled and bitter at times, but never dull. “Them Old Cowboy Songs” is the story of a young Wyoming couple who set up housekeeping on a small piece of land. When work dries up Archie goes off to find ranch work herding cattle while his pregnant wife Rose, holds down the fort and suffers a harsh winter and harsher delivery. Neither survive, and their tragic ends are related in blunt prose devoid of sentimentality or pity.

Proulx offers a slice of life steeped in simple truths. Her characters are unfettered by any sense of entitlement. They live hard and die harder.

A couple of stories border on science fiction. “The Sagebrush Kid” is a tall tale of a man-eating, sage plant that began as the surrogate child of a barren woman. Her longing for a child was so profound, even a sage plant would do. After nurturing it with gravy and meat, the plant develops a taste for flesh and folks start disappearing as if they had just entered the Brumuda triangle.

Enter the devil himself. In “I've Always Loved This Place” the Devil and his secretary, Duane Fork, consider upgrading hell. It is passé says the Devil as he thinks up more diabolical torments for each ring of the inferno.

“Tits-up in a Ditch,” is the story of Dakotah Lister, an illegitimate child abandoned by her mother. Dakotah received little love from the grandparents who raised her. She leaves when the first available man shows affection for her. The mistake is revealed immediately but not before Dakotah finds herself with child. Even the relatives show little sympathy. Dakotah enlists as a means of surviving and ends up in Iraq . In the end her life travels full circle, back to the ranch in Wyoming she so eagerly fled with little to comfort her save the pain of loss and the unfathomable depths of grief.

Many of these are not happy stories, but each is a revelation. Proulx mines the human heart in places where emotions have been tamped hard as diamonds.

Proulx is author of Shipping News: A Novel, Postcards and That Old Ace in the Hole among others.