Idaho Commission for Libraries

Close Range collects eleven short stories set in rural Wyoming, including two O. Henry Prize winners for the year’s best short story, “Brokeback Mountain” and “The Mud Below” (both of which originally appeared in The New Yorker), and another (“The Half-Skinned Steer”) which was chosen for The Best American Short Stories 1998 and The Best American Short Stories of the Century (1999).  Proulx’s characters are memorable: lonely, stubborn, violent, and usually down-on-their luck, full of yearning. On ranches and in small towns, on the rodeo circuit and in bars and menial jobs, they look for love, for stability, for something to give their lives meaning, but their fates play out darkly, in most cases.  The huge empty landscape of Wyoming is a vivid presence in this book, the stage for great and small human tragedies.  The stories are full of vivid, gritty details about contemporary western life; of their style, one reviewer said, “every single sentence surprises and delights and just bowls you over.”

Reviews

Author Information

(Edna) Annie Proulx was nearly 60 years old when her second novel, The Shipping News, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award for fiction in 1994.  She was born in 1935 in Connecticut to parents of French-Canadian ancestry, was educated at Colby College and Sir George Williams University (now Concordia University) in Montreal.  She began her career as a journalist, then began publishing stories in the 1970s and 1980s.  After her first novel appeared, in 1992, she was awarded NEA and Guggenheim fellowships.  She has won many prizes for her work (including The New Yorker Book Award Best Fiction 1999 for Close Range); “Brokeback Mountain” was made into a movie in 2005 and was nominated for eight Academy Awards, winning three.  She is divorced and has three children.  She has lived in Wyoming since 1994, spending part of the year in Newfoundland. 

Chronology

Interview by Charlie Rose

Discussion Questions

1. Most of these characters’ lives are unhappy.  How much effect do factors beyond their control play in their fates: their upbringing, their class, their luck?  How much of their suffering is their own fault?  Could some of these stories have ended differently?

2. What role does the Wyoming landscape play here, as agent in the stories and as symbol?   Is this a specifically “Wyoming,” or “western” book, or could these people live in any rural area?

3.  Compare the women characters with the men.  Do the women seem any more, or less resilient?  Self-directed?  Self-destructive?  The majority of these stories have male lead characters, vs. female, though Proulx is a woman.  Does that seem significant or appropriate in some way to you?

4. What makes these characters tick?  What motivates them, what do they want, what do they fear?  Are they universal in these respects, or particularly “western” in some way?

5. Do you feel empathy for these characters?  Why or why not?

6. Which of these stories seem particularly well-constructed as stories to you, in terms of plot, character, style, etc.?  What is it about these stories that made them so critically admired, do you think?

7. One reviewer noted that the stories don’t simply repeat each other, but afford subtle mood changes, playing the themes out “in eleven different keys.”  Do you agree?  What are those overarching themes, and how do individual stories build ad expand them?