SOURCE: Jacobs, Rita D. Review of Close Range, by Annie Proulx. World Literature Today 74, no. 2 (spring 2000): 369.

In the following review, Jacobs offers a generally positive assessment of Close Range.

Annie Proulx is perhaps best known for her Pulitzer Prize—winning novel The Shipping News and for her luscious prose, which is also in evidence in Close Range in evocative descriptions like the following: “It was her voice that drew you in, that low, twangy voice, wouldn't matter if she was saying the alphabet, what you heard was the rustle of hay. She could make you smell the smoke from an unlit fire.”

These eleven stories are populated by images of unrequited longing, wide-open spaces, hardscrabble lives, and characters with unlikely names: Ottaline Touhey, Sutton Muddyman, Car Scrope, Sweets Musgrove, to cite just a few. Two of the pieces, “The Blood Bay” and “55 Miles to the Gas Pump,” are...