Proulx's talent for bringing a distant part of the country alive to her readers depends largely on her descriptive techniques. Like any place-centered narratives, the stories in Close Range include a great deal of descriptive detail about the setting. Proulx controls this description, however, and prevents it from intruding on the general flow of the narrative. In "The Mud Below" for example, Proulx interweaves the drive of her protagonist from one rodeo to another with lush description of the landscape through which he moves: they ended on rimrock south of the Wyo line, tremendous roll of rough country in front of them, a hundred-mile sightline with bands of antelope and cattle like tiny flecks that flew from hard-worked nib pens on old promissory notes. They backtracked and sidetracked and a few miles outside Greybull Diamond pointed.....
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