“Fine Just the Way It Is” (Scribner, 221 pages, $25), by Annie Proulx
It was Annie Proulx’s award-winning “Brokeback Mountain” — a tale of love between two Wyoming cowboys — that became an Academy Award-winning film.
Her brilliant new book of nine short stories still centers on the state where she has lived for more than a decade — it’s subtitled “Wyoming Stories 3.” She has a marked soft spot for ranch life and doesn’t sentimentalize it.
“For Archie,” she writes about one of her least fortunate characters, “the work was the usual ranch hand’s luck — hard, dirty, long and dull. There was no time for anything but saddle up, ride, rope, cut, herd, unsaddle, eat, sleep and do it again.”
The stories are mostly melancholy, such as the one about the young woman who breaks with her lover in a silly quarrel over an iceberg lettuce. She refuses a reconciliation and starts alone on the long hike they had planned to take together over a dangerous, closed and hardly used trail. Her adventure moves so rapidly and fatally that the reader does well to avoid going too fast and missing the beauty and vividness of a scene. For example, this of a summer mountain:
“Its year-round snow cover was gone and the peak stood obscenely bare, a pale grey summit quivering in radiant heat. Rock that had not seen sunlight in hundreds of years lay exposed. Another hot, dry summer, the sky filling with wind-torn clouds and lightning but no rain. Occasionally a few drops rattled the air before the clouds dragged them away.”
General sadness about the West and a bitter final story about war in “Eye-rack” are tempered by two out of the nine. In those, the protagonist is no less than the Devil. An annoyingly fussy type, the Evil One becomes a vehicle for exposing some of the author’s dislikes: the Tour de France, oddly enough, and air travel.
In one called “I’ve Always Loved This Place,” he devises a new routine for arrivals in “the main Welcome to Hell foyer”:
“He or she would find combined features of the world’s worst air terminals, Hongqiao in Shanghai the ideal,” he says, “complete with petty officials, sadomasochistic staffers, consecutive security checks of increasing harshness, rapidly fluctuating gate changes and departure times and, finally, a 27 hour trip in an antiquated and overcrowded bucket flying through typhoons while rivets popped against the fuselage.”
Some of the Devil’s projects for the improvement of hell annoy Charon, the boatman from Greek mythology who ferries the dead across the river Styx.
“Fine just the way it is,” snarls Charon, both silencing the Devil and furnishing the title for Proulx’s book.
On the dust cover the title surmounts a photo of a wretched shack in the desert.
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