Review: Fine Just the Way It Is

Annie Proulx must have been born with a stick of straw in her mouth. Her writing channels the dust and tumbleweed of the ornery American prairie as evocatively as Ry Cooder’s haunting Paris, Texas guitar slides.

The best tales in her collection of short stories, Fine Just the Way It Is, settle on this theme. Crusty, lean 'n' mean folk living in harsh and unforgiving environments in tough times.

Bleak? Well yes, especially since Proulx is no sentimentalist. But human resilience, unexpected tenderness, hope and against-the-odds optimism provide relief, and save us from potential wrist-slashing.

Take for example the story of Archie and Rose in Them Old Cowboy Songs. A couple of married kids from meagre backgrounds aiming to build themselves a future out on their isolated scrap of land.

Their initial happiness is evident, despite the hardships of a one-room, hand-built cabin, daily lugging buckets of water from the stream, splitting kindling, hacking at stony ground to clear the land, and day-long staking out of elk and deer to provide them with meat on the table.

Truly heart wrenching is the scene ending with Archie’s words: “It’s. I ain’t never been. Loved. I just can’t hardly stand it ...”

Hard times intervene, a baby is on the way, and things start turning sour between them. The strain of their subsistence living, and the dream to get ahead drive Archie to leave home in search of work and money. Rose stays. Alone, deserted, numbly waiting, bleakly hopeful of the future of their desire.

Despite the touching moments of compassion and humanity in what follows, spiteful neighbours, careless friends and cruel bosses bring them undone in the most tragic of ways. It’s a moving story.

Annie Proulx’s characters in these cowboy stories bring to mind the bit-part actors in the Westerns we watched on Saturday afternoon outings as kids. They are that old guy sitting on the tilt-back chair outside the saloon, or the scrawny stripling cleaning out the stable and running to get the Doc after the shoot-out at the corral. They are the thin-lipped, thin-backed, dour pioneer wives and the primping jezebels flouncing around the raw, rough townships.

But do people in Wyoming where Proulx lives really have names like Bunk Peck, Chay Sump, Queeda Dorgan, Fenk Crosley, and Harp Daft, or is that just Proulx’s creative muse gone wild?

Proulx presents other themes too. For instance her quirky satires of a kind of ‘postmodern’ Hell, with the Devil (“who has the warmest feelings for Manolo Blahnik”) and his sit-com assistant Duane Fork, are clever and amusing.

Proulx has long been a favourite of mine. This Collection takes her back to the country and characters of Brokeback Mountain and confirms her extreme skill and inventiveness as a writer.

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