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: Brilliant sketches of a wild place
Review: This is the first book I've read by Annie Proulx. I picked it up because I read a favorable review of Bad Dirt: Wyoming Stories 2, and thought I ought to start with the first collection.
The stories are slices of life of all sorts of people who live mainly in solitude in Wyoming and include some darkly funny tall tales among the more realistic-seeming ones.
I've never lived in Wyoming, although I now live close to it. I know only a couple of people who live there, and they don't really seem to fit the profile of any of the hard-luck, hard-bitten characters in these stories. However, I have driven the dirty, dusty, nameless dirt-and-gravel roads that criss-cross the lonely state. I have seen the landscape, from the endless dry high plains to the majesty of the Medicine Bow and Teton Mountains to the downright bizarreness of Yellowstone Park. As I've bumped along these roads, I've seen lonely outposts -- ranches, shacks, trailers, lean-tos, resort homes -- and have wondered what sort of person tries to scratch out a living in such dusty loneliness. The stories in this book are ones I would have made up driving by those outposts if I were only a little more clever. The characters are drawn simply but sharply by Ms. Proulx's amazing gift of metaphor. This gift extends to her description of the real star of all the stories -- the land. While I may not know Wyoming folks well, I know enough about their land to know that the descriptions of it in this book are spot-on and beautiful.
I recommend this book highly (but maybe not to those with very weak stomachs), and I'm really looking forward to reading more of Ms. Proulx's work.
Rating: 
Summary: feh
Review: I enjoyed "The Shipping News", and think Wyoming is a
beautiful state, so I thought this might be a worthwhile
read. In my opinion, it wasn't. Ms. Proulx seems to dislike
the people, leaving no doubt everyone in Wyoming is a
redneck, and every family abusive....Not bad writing, but
disappointing content.
Rating: 
Summary: A lot of the same
Review: Proulx's style of writing takes some getting used to. I was hoping to enjoy these stories as much as I had enjoyed Accordian Crimes but after a while the stories all started to sound the same to me. She seems to delight in taking a small moment in time (the six seconds to ride a bull at a rodeo) and expand that moment of time out with lots of internal monologue and flash back. While these techniques can be great tools for character development she just doesn't manage much of that in these stories leaving all the stories to bleed together like one disjointed stream of conciousness account of Wyoming.
Rating:
Summary: Best book I've read in a long time
Review: I was UNDERWHELMED by "The Shipping News," while at the same time I couldn't put it down. My mother had the same reaction. "I can't figure out why I ever finished this book about such weird people," she said when she sent it to me. We both agreed we'd hated it.
After this experience, I only picked up "Close Range: Wyoming Stories" because of the last story, "Brokeback Mountain," and the controversy due both to the subject matter and from the film currently being shot by Ang Lee, starring two Hollywood "Pretty Boys" Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger.
After reading these stories, I think I get it.
Proulx is a master of the short story. The short, spare sentences rapidly flesh out characters and a correspondingly spare and beautiful landscape, without becoming bogged down in the endless, bleak exposition that filled most of "The Shipping News."
In the context of the short story, where Proulx doesn't have a novel's luxury of pages, her prose becomes economic rather than self-indulgent, setting tone and describing the characters and the life in the high altitudes of Wyoming with the deadly accuracy of a keen blade.
There's not a lot of laughs in Proulx's books, and the juxtaposion of the characters' hard, cruel and bleak lives with the unforgiving Wyoming landscape is nothing short of devastating. But, unlike "The Shipping News," it works here. The stories start with a bang with "The Half-Skinned Steer," an unrelenting look at a man who's been chewed up and spit out by his early years in Wyoming, coming to an ironic end in a snowstorm a few miles from the ranch he's returning to for a funeral. Proulx builds to a climax through the stories with tales of characters suffused with regret, loss, and the will to go on living despite cruel, painful lives. The final story, "Brokeback Mountain," is the tale of two uneducated cowboys who meet and fall in love during a harsh summer of sheepherding in 1963, and how their love and lives fail them over the next 20 years, finally ending with the inevitable tragic conclusion...yet painting a bittersweet picture of survival in the face of a time and landscape that spawned the murder of Matthew Shepard.
Again, devastating. This story made me cry for the first time in 25 years, every time I read it.
These stories are not for the faint of heart, but if you can handle them, you will find yourself dwelling on them for months, when you have a minute and your day is quiet.
Extremely highly recommended, and not nearly as depressing as it sounds. And by the way, I can't wait for the film of "Brokeback Mountain."
Rating:
Summary: A little too bleak for my taste ...
Review: I'm not quite sure what to make of this collection. I loved AP's writing style and wanted to be drawn into the stories. However the problem was that once was I was in the stories I wasn't sure I wanted to be there - I found the subject matter a little too depressing - I had imagined stoical countryfolk living bleak but dignified lives against a magnificent, uncompromising landscape. Instead I was a little taken aback by the undignified and squalid behaviour of the charactors and how they all seem doomed to end up unhappy. Surely their are SOME happy marriages/parent-child relationships in this part of the world? I liked 'Brokeback Mountain' but the rest of the stories seemed a bit samey. I've never been to America but based on AP's view of it, I think I would give Wyoming a wide berth!In some ways Ms Prolux reminds me of Thomas Hardy - the same tales of lives predestined to unhappiness against the uncaring splendour of nature - but unlike Hardy she appears to lack a sense of humour/or any compassion for her characters. Her characters have no nobility, hence it becomes difficult for the reader to empathise with their plight.
Rating:
Summary: A Subtle and Unrelenting Comedy
Review: After carefully anylising Proulx character development and precise diction it seems to me that the whether the characters depicted by Proulx capture the spirit of Wyoming is irrelevant. Each of these characters should be taken both in correlation with the setting and also they should be allowed to stand on their own. These characters should serve to titilate by thier absurd responses to life, not to portray an active representation of the Wyoming landscape. Proulx makes a very conscious effort to seperate Wyoming from her characters. If fact you could say that Wyoming could be seen as an individual character. Each character interacts with eachother but they are not to be taken as the same thing.
Rating: 
Summary: I Enjoyed It, But Not For Everyone
Review: Brothers Grimm dealt in folklore, myth and truth using language that confronted, that did not hide, say, an act of cannibalism, and revealed in their stories some of our fears, hopes and dreams. Ms Proulx has, in CLOSE RANGE, created a language that reflects the nature of the characters who inhabit this landscape, a language which is cryptic, dense, and evocative and does not hide, say, an act of love between two men. The language is a triumph, sweeping the reader along in its power, immersing the reader in the world of the rancher, cowhand, rodeo riders and sheepherders, their search for love, for money, their recognition of meaning through their work, in a landscape more of a hell than an El Dorado. She can sum a character up in a sentence and there is more than a little humour in the hundreds of proper nouns which sparkle and colour her stories - people like Car, Skipper, Cake, Freeze, Hulse, Haul, and Wrench; places like Brokeback, Fiddle and Bow, Slope, Casper. Vivid characterisations - Mrs Freeze and Ottaline are especially memorable but so are Jack Twist and Ennis Del Mar. Issues such as the transformation of the west through tourism and corporate ownership make the stories resonate and the metaphor of the lumbering Cadillac slumping off into a ditch at night in the snow in minus 10 degrees weather may say more about modern man and nature than the collected works of many others.
There is magic at work here, no less than there is in the works of Brothers Grimm, but there's much more too.
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