SOURCE: Rubin, Merle. “Cowboy Country.” Christian Science Monitor (3 June 1999): 20.

In the following review, Rubin examines the strengths of Close Range's “evocative, sinewy, sometimes glittering prose.”

Novelist and storyteller Annie Proulx has made a specialty of what might be called fancy writing about plain folks. The characters we meet in her new story collection, Close Range, are the flinty cowboys and ranchers of Wyoming.

“Wyos,” she tells us, in a story called “A Lonely Coast,” “are touchers, hot-blooded and quick, and physically yearning. Maybe it's because they spend so much time handling livestock, but people here are always handshaking, patting, smoothing, caressing, enfolding. This instinct extends to anger, the lightning backhand slap, the hip-shot to throw you off balance, … and then the serious stuff that's meant to kill and sometimes does.”

There's certainly violence in these stories, and plenty of raunchiness, loneliness, anger, and stoic humor. Life here...