SOURCE: Bakopoulos, Dean. “Woes of the West.” Progressive 63, no. 9 (September 1999): 43–44.

In the following review, Bakopoulos offers a positive assessment of Close Range, but comments that Proulx's stories are occasionally overburdened by excessive detail.

The American West has been a favorite setting for many of the heavyweights of contemporary fiction: Cormac McCarthy, Rick Bass, Jim Harrison, Ivan Doig, and Richard Ford. Women who set their stories in Big Sky country (Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho) have not received the same critical acclaim and publishing hullabaloo as their male counterparts.

Enter Annie Proulx. She has only five books in print—including Heart Songs and Other Stories (1988), Postcards (1992), The Shipping News (1993), and Accordion Crimes (1996), all published by Scribner. Even so, Proulx has already won the PEN/Faulkner Award (for Postcards), as well as the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize (both for The Shipping News).

Her second collection of short stories...