Rating: 
Summary: Bloated and pretentious
Review: So many people are enthralled with Proulx's style, which I find maddeningly self-serving and completely devoid of substance. Her addiction to metaphor and superfluous adjectives makes her writing "lyrical" to some, but I think it's a sloppy mess. Ah, if only real critics like Rebecca West were still around to give writers like Ms. Proulx the reprimanding she deserves for writing in such an unfocused way, eager to impress through vocabulary rather than lucid imagery or concentrated characterization. Many times the images she concocts are contradictory, and simply don't make sense. If you want style, beauty, and insight, read the master with whom she shares the first four letters of her name. There you will find genius.
Rating: 
Summary: Living Hard Lives
Review: The Wyoming we see in this collection of stories is a bleak, tough, forbidding, and sometimes violent land. People die, crops are lost, indebtedness multiplies, farms fail, and hardships abound. Although the setting is contemporary, the characters live in an almost peasant culture. Places have names like All Night Creek, the Freezeouts, and Dirty Water. Some of the characters are Tick Corn, Hondo Gunsch, Pake Bitts, Dirt Sheets, Dig Yant, Car Scrope, John Wrench, Hulse Birch, Como Bewd, and Wauneta Hipsag.The writing is rough and harsh in many cases. I could not read more than one story at a time....I needed a break from their bleakness and the damaged, lonely, out-of luck characters. So why read them? Because they portray a gritty but realistic lifestyle, man fighting against the fates and rarely succeeding....and after the first two stories, you are hooked. In the beginning of "The Mud Below," at a rodeo, Diamond Felts is on a bull (jokingly called Kisses) which is as "big as a boxcar of coal." You read because you want to know if Diamond's long-term string of rodeo losses will end. You find yourself always hoping. The most memorable (to me) story was "Brokeback Mountain". Ennis and Jack, two high school dropouts with no future to speak of, find themselves physically attracted to each other while tending sheep on Brokeback Mountain. Knowing that in Wyoming guys are often beaten for this sort of behavior, they marry women and have children, and allow themselves to see each other only once a year on their "fishing trips". Proulx's spare writing echoes the setting of her stories and draws the reader right into them. Her research must have been extensive to allow her to write so knowledgeably. Not a book for the faint of heart, but one which you will be glad you read. I am especially glad that I was able to get one of the illustrated hardcover books.
Rating: 
Summary: Outstanding Writing with a Rugged, Romantic Wild West Feel
Review: Having grown up in Wyoming, this book is about the rather unique Western characters out there in this rugged land. Most of the people I met out there were not like this at all. They're pretty much like the rest of America in all the other parts I've lived. Proux capitalizes on that segment of Wyoming which is like that unbroken horse, never ridden, never will. Free and gritty and rugged with not much polish or class, like the many faceted wilderness that comprises this vast and diverse state. I especially liked her story "The Mud Below." Reminded me of some characters at college who were like this, except that weren't quite so crass or naive as she has this brave, little bull rider. Unique, well crafted stories which captivate the mind and entertain greatly. A truly unique and talented story teller. To be read and enjoyed.
Rating:
Summary: Beautiful, unsparing stories of a beautiful, unsparing land.
Review: Annie Proulx is an expert on the extremes of both human and meterological behavior; she knows how weather and topography can both kill people physically and warp them mentally. The stories in "Close Range" demonstrate, in finely honed sentences that sting like scorpions' tails, the danger of living in an unforgiving landscape and of trying to deny the power of land and weather. "The Half-Skinned Steer" is a brilliant, semi-surreal parable of an old man who thinks he has risen above his roots; "The Mud Below" is a remarkable character study, finding deep sympathy for a young bullrider who is slowly, shockingly revealed to be pathological. My own favorite is the final story, "Brokeback Mountain," perhaps the saddest, most moving love story ever written. Be warned that Annie Proulx does not write for sentimentalists; she is even more ruthless than Larry McMurtry in sacrificing lovable characters, probing the stupidity and meanness of humanity, and above all depicting the sheer pitilessness of the Western landscape. But for those who come prepared, she will take your breath away. The hardcover version is worth buying for the masterful illustrations of William Matthews, which depict the Wyoming mountains as Edward Hopper might have painted them.
Rating:
Summary: Cowboys Rock!
Review: This is a tremendous collection of stories. The prose is magnificent; Proulx continuously finds new ways to say common things (my favorite: "his mouth seems to have been cut with a single chisel blow into easy flesh"). What's more, as amazing as the prose is, Proulx is just as concerned with story (a concern too often lost among contemporary writers); these stories rock with happening! Standouts: "Brokeback Mountain" (a frank glance into doomed cowboy love); "People in Hell Just Want a Drink of Ice Water" (poetic in its depiction of the brutality of life); "55 Miles to the Gas Pump" (probably the shortest serial killer story ever told). Proulx's stories deal with the harshness that is contemporary life -- but always with an edge of humor, a touch of the whimsical (a sort of Ray Carver in Big Country). All are excellent, deserving of your reading list.
Rating: 
Summary: Disappointed. Again.
Review: While Annie Proulx can render a fine image and has firsthand knowledge of her landscape and her characters, nonetheless all the recent accolades and critical acclaim have hyped her beyond her talents, creating expectations that her book cannot deliver upon. Her prose style is neither that of a virtuoso nor that of a hack--at first read she has an interesting "stew" method wherein she creates a rambling sentence from various fragments of speech, but before too many pages pass this seems less creative than lazy: her cacophony of details begins to read like reproductions from a writer's journal or a cookbook, and one can imagine her laving huge portions of her notes into stories that by necessity cannot be conventional in form as they are largely formless. There are certainly some fine moments in this collection, but once the dust has cleared, Proulx is entirely unessential, both in this work and in Postcards (I cannot speak for any other of her books). These stories at times sound the same dull bell-notes over and over: tough lives, tough people, tough landscape. Many call her "poetic" but among contemporary writers both Ondaatje and McCarthy are far more successful in melding the mechanics of prose with the awe of poetry. Were Proulx's name not shouted from the mountaintops so much lately perhaps one could be a far more forgiving reader, but for a book so greatly hyped, I was greatly disappointed.
Rating:
Summary: haunting
Review: Great literature isn't always easy to stomach. These stories can be real gut clenchers (specially in the case of old Mr. Croom), but they stick with you. This book is the first I've read by Proulx and already I'm dying to read her novels. Just keep an open mind with this one knowing that almost none of us will ever be in similar predicaments. The beauty of these stories is not in the gruesome imagery but in the exploration of a different culture within our own.
Rating:
Summary: Brutal and beautiful
Review: The stories in Close Range are diverse and often grim. Buried within the grimness is a dry humor best exposed in "The Blood Bay" -- about a cowboy who finds a pair boots in the bitter Wyoming winter. "The Bunchgrass Edge of the World" is about a failing ranch family and their overweight daughter's quest to find a man. One of her suitors is a broke-down & vengeful tractor. On the grimmer side is "People in Hell Just Want a Drink of Water," a story about a two families and the tragedy that strikes a member of one of them: Rasmussen, who gets mangled in a car wreck and returns home (brain damaged and scarred)to be taken care of by his parents. I read this while vacationing in Wyoming. At first, I thought that while the stories were brilliantly written, the characters she writes about surely couldn't exist. Then, as I drove through some of the places she wrote of & saw the people who lived there eating in small diners or driving by in battered pick up trucks, I understood that I was mistaken. These characters are alive & living in a world quite alien from the city life most of us know. Her language draws us into the world of red hoodoos, sagebrush, and winter storms where struggling alchoholic ranchers eek out a living while their children flee to cities and become vegetarians only to be replaced by Californians who move to Wyoming to live "the simple life." It's a hard and bitter world in which her characters inhabit, moving about it not realizing that they are ghosts and that the world has passed them by. Her knowledge of language and farm life is both astounding and at times frightening. This is what writing should be.
Rating:
Summary: Twisted
Review: Our book group picked this book. A couple people had started reading the book and shared at the last meeting. One said that she had a hard time getting into the book and was only on the first story. She felt that there was too much time spent building the characters. The other women who had started reading the book said that was what it was about, building the "character" of Wyoming. That was a great way for me to start reading the book. I couldn't wait to finish one story to get to the next. Then I read People in Hell... the rest of the book was hard to take. I found the book depressing, twisted and dark. Rough Wyoming. This book will provide plenty of discussion for our book group though. I guess this goes to show that as long as one can write well, you can write about anything you want and get good reviews.
Rating:
Summary: Stories Destined to Stand the Test of Time
Review: Annie Proulx's "Close Range: Wyoming Stories" is so rich in language and characters, so textured in details of plot, landscape and memory, that it is difficult to decide where to begin a review of this dark, often disturbing, but ultimately overpowering collection of eleven stories. The names of the characters who people these stories suggests their grim and stinted existence: Hulse Birch, Wauneta Hipsag, Shy Hamp, Noyce Hair, Sutton Muddyman, Car Scrope, Pake Bitts, Horm Timsley. They are characters who lead desperate lives as rodeo riders, cowboys, sheep farmers, and poor ranchers. As one reviewer has suggested, "[n]o one is successful here except the bar owners, the dude ranchers and the cattle traders, and they are always just offstage, counting their money." Shattering all romantic illusions of the West, Proulx paints a relentlessly bleak picture of characters who cannot escape their past, who are often driven by the basest of instincts, and whose hardscrabble existence is continually overwhelmed by exigencies of geography, climate and landscape. It is a claustrophobic and atrophied world, a world where possibilities have narrowed to nothing. As a character in "A Lonely Coast" disquietly relates while sitting at the Golden Buckle bar, "[t]here were times when I thought the Buckle was the best place in the world, but it could shift on you and then the whole dump seemed a mess of twist-faced losers, the women with eyebrows like crowbars, the men covered with bristly red hair, knuckles the size of new potatoes, showing the gene pool was small and the rivulets that had once fed it had dried up." When a character does try to escape his past, he invariably meets with a bitter end. Thus, in the story "People in Hell Just Want a Drink of Water", Ras Tinsley, a boy who "was smart with numbers, read books [and] asked complicated questions no one could answer," leaves Wyoming at the age of sixteen to see the world. Gone more than five years, his parents finally hear that he has been severely injured in an auto accident. Arriving back home by train, thanks to the courtesy of a Methodist minister, his parents can barely recognize him. "He was a monster. The left side of his face and head had been damaged and torn, had healed in a mass of crimson scars. There was a whistling hole in his throat and a scarred left eye socket. His jaw was deformed." But that is not the end of Ras Tinsley's misery. He rides the range, exposing himself to women and young girls, until neighboring ranchers deal with him in a grim and sadistic way. Similarly, in "The Half-Skinned Steer", a story selected by John Updike for inclusion in "The Best American Short Stories of the Century", Mero Corn, an "octogenarian vegetarian" (or "a cattleman gone wrong") who had left his Wyoming home more than sixty years earlier, meets a darkly mystical end while returing for his brother's funeral. Proulx captures the grim, gritty reality of rodeo life in "The Mud Below", one of the best stories in this collection. Its hard bitten, bull riding protagonist, Diamond Felts, remembering back to a day when he watched a ranch hand gelding calves, grimly reflects that, "[t]he course of life's events seemed slower than the knife but not less thorough." Proulx's densely evocative prose strkingly captures, as well, the paralyzing loneliness of her characters. In "The Bunchgrass Edge of the World" Ottaline Touhey, a lonely, spinsterish girl "distinguished by a physique approaching the size of a hundred-gallon propane tank," finds herself communing with an old green tractor, a tractor that speaks to her in a voice "hoarse and plangent, just above an injured whisper, a movie gangster's voice." The tractor, seeminly protective of her, confesses to killing a ranch hand in a rollover accident many years earlier, a ranch hand who had unseemly desires for the then four-year-old Ottaline. The story, like the others in this book, ultimately ends with a clever little twist of fate involving the tractor. More than anything, however, "Open Range: Wyoming Stories" brilliantly draws relationships between its characters and the land, using nature as a touchstone for the plots to follow. Thus, in "Pair a Spurs", Car Scrope, who had lived on the Coffeepot Ranch for the entire forty years of his life, had developed a "morbid passion for the ranch as a child when he believed he could hear the grass mocking him." Remembering his older brother's apparent suicide, something which his parents never talked to him about, Scrope remembers the grass hissing, "best one lost, worst one stays." In "Brokeback Mountain", perhaps the finest story in this remarkable collection, two young cowboys develop a passionate, life-long and, ultimately destructive, relationship while herding sheep in the mountains one summer. Foreshadowing the story to come, Proulx describes them descending the mountain with vivid imagery: "The mountain boiled with demonic energy, glazed with flickering broken-cloud light, the wind combed the grass and drew from the damaged krummholz and slit rock a bestial drone. As they descended the slope Ennis felt he was in slow motion, but headlong, irreversible fall." Reading "Open Range: Wyoming Stories" is like gorging yourself on a dark chocolate cake. The writing is richly layered, the author deeply in touch with her characters and her place. It is fiction brilliantly written, stories destined to stand the test of time.
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