Bad Dirt By Annie Proulx 4th Estate, 219pp. £12.99
Any literary stylist inevitably faces the risk of caricature. The more idiosyncratic the style, the stronger the caricature. In common with the great Dickens, US original Annie Proulx has always called upon a full cast of oddballs and weirdos in narratives that can leave readers thinking they must have walked into someone else's bad dream. Her zany humour tends towards the back-slapping, full hee-haw variety rather than the subtle aside.
Yet, at her best, she reaches heights few other writers would dare attempt. Proulx's genius lies in her understanding of the crazy life-routes that bring characters to small town hellholes that usually have funny names but could all be called Nowhere.
Despite her having written four novels to date, including Postcards and The Shipping News, which won the Pulitzer Prize, she is a natural short story writer, and her finest tales rank among the classics of American short fiction. One of them, 'Brokeback Mountain', is her masterpiece. Initially published solo in late 1998, as a 57 page book, 'Brokeback Mountain' later featured in Close Range: Wyoming Stories, which appeared in the summer of 1999. It was an important volume, not just because it is her second collection and a worthy, if not quite equal, follow-up to her outstanding short fiction début, Heart Songs, which had been published quietly in the US in 1987, before finally appearing in Britain in the wake of her international success with The Shipping News. Close Range also marked her leaving her familiar north-eastern Vermont and Newfoundland landscape in favour of the real west - wind-blasted Wyoming.
With this change of landscape, Proulx, whose eccentricity is now matched by unpredictability, has increasingly turned to the surreal; when she wants to be funny, she pushes realism out the door, and the yarns often fall flat. This manifested itself a couple of times in some of the lesser stories of Close Range. It also occurs in the new collection; take the arrival of seasonally hired alligators recruited from Florida to scare cattle. Interestingly, whereas Proulx previously forced language - and her prose can be daring, jagged-edged, and almost abrupt - she is now testing narrative credibility.
If some of the stories are weak and fanciful, the writing is good and sharp. It would be easy to decide that the best of this collection lies in its snappy, vivid prose, if there were not three outstanding stories lurking like snakes under the sage grass, ready to pounce and prove exactly how good she can be.
Just be warned, Proulx tests a reader's patience. It is a useful warning. After all, the opening sentence of the first story, reads: "On a November day Wyoming game and fish warden Creel Zmundzinski was making his way down the Pinchbutt drainage through the thickening light of late afternoon." Enter yet another character with a cartoon name and it seems as if Proulx is content to concentrate her energies on inventing more caricatures. The warden apprehends the Reverend Jefford J. Pecker, a dastardly poacher. In the moments before the arrest, Zmundzinski, while waiting for the reverend to locate the hunting licence he clearly does not have, reflects upon his distant youth and his erstwhile mentor, Orion Horncrackle, who had also been a game and fish warden. But the reverend is tricky. Luckily for Zmundzinski, his prisoner falls into a hole in the ground and vanishes. The bewildered warden "didn't know what'd happened, but it had saved a lot of paperwork". The good news spreads and all the local lawmen happily dispose of their arrests.
One story concerns a beard-growing contest; another features three badgers; one a retired professor, while there is even one about a magic tea kettle. It is as if Proulx is merely filling time with some of these pieces.
But then she draws on all of her art and wisdom and the result is 'What Kind of Furniture Would Jesus Pick?' in which one man's life of serial disappointment is tempered by his belief in the land and his love of his mother.
Passed over by love, and rejected by Vietnam as unfit, Gilbert Wolfscale, heading for 60 at the end of the 20th century, is the last of a dying breed and he knows it. "The old world was gone, he knew that. For some reason a day in the 1950s when all the ranchers and their hands had worked on the road rose often in his mind and with such vividness that he could smell the mud, the mineral odor of wet rock." By the close of the story, Gilbert is delayed by a parade. Slowly he realises its theme is the Old West. " . . . and it came to him that there had been no ranchers in the parade - it was all pioneers, outlaws, Indians and gas."
Another strong story, 'Man Crawling Out of Trees', exercises all of Proulx's caustic knowing as she follows a stalemated New York couple, post double affairs, through their time in Wyoming, a place they had initially viewed as "both an adventure and a sensible move". They prove no match for the natives. Mitchell, the New York husband, however, finds his bond through the landscape and the wildlife and stays, while his wife retreats to New York.
Best of the three good stories is 'The Wamsutter Wolf', in which Buddy Millar, a guy who can't even house-sit his parent's home without it being ransacked, ends up in Wamsutter - "a desperate place" - in a filthy rented trailer. His neighbours turn out to be deadbeats he has known years before at school, and one of them, Rase Wham, had severely beaten him. Buddy is invited to share a doomed meal. Proulx never sets a foot wrong, the characterisation and dialogue are perfect, as is the description of the trailer squalor. This story alone justifies buying the collection. Of the 11 narratives, only three are vintage Proulx. She has taken new territory and made it her own. When she feels like putting in the effort to follow characters not stereotypes, her stories certainly still speak volumes - as the all-seeing Proulx misses nothing.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
Eileen Battersby