Annie Proulx's latest collection of short stories opens with half a page of acknowledgements in which the author thanks, among other people and places, "Assistant Archivist Anne M Guzzo at the American Heritage Centre, University of Wyoming", "Ron Lockwood of Wyoming Game and Fish" and the "Coe Library of the University of Wyoming". To those familiar with Proulx's work, the only surprising thing about this is that the list is so short: why just the half-page when, in previous books, she has taken as many as three to thank those who have assisted her? It would be tempting to interpret her new-found brevity as indicating that she has abandoned her habitual reliance on research. However, another explanation is more likely - that, having lived in Wyoming for a decade and having already published one short story collection set there (Close Range, 1999), Proulx's knowledge of the state has become so extensive that it wasn't necessary, or even possible, to learn anything more.
Perhaps more than any other novelist, Proulx is known for writing about real places. She seldom sets her fictions in regions where she has not lived, or at least conducted lengthy field trips, and she wears this reliance on research as a professional badge of honour. At its best, the method yields fiction that is powerfully mimetic of the countryside in which it is set, her prose taking on the contours of such unforgiving locations as Newfoundland, the Texas panhandle and rural Wyoming. At its worst, it results in stories and novels that seem pinched, static and unimaginative.
The drawbacks were particularly apparent in Proulx's most recent novel, That Old Ace in the Hole, an interminable coming-of-age story about a young naIf called Bob Dollar who goes to live in the Texas panhandle in order to scout for land on behalf of a multinational hog-farming corporation. As became obvious, Bob's quest was really a vehicle for Proulx to regale the reader with the details of her research into the area and its inhabitants: much of the novel consisted of lectures and potted histories, conveyed either directly or in the form of reported speech, about such topics as windmill maintenance and ditch irrigation. Proulx also saddled her characters with various silly names - Ribeye Cluke, the widow LaVon Fronk, Rope Butt - as if this could compensate for the paucity of invention.
Bad Dirt is likewise cluttered with outlandish monikers: Orion Horncrackle, Mercedes de Silhouette, Wiregrass Cokendall. In other respects, however, the book marks a return to form. Wisely, Proulx has reverted to the short story, a form whose brevity acts as a corrective to her tendency to overdo the detail. Most of her trademark skills are on display in these tales; they include a talent for metaphor, a wry sense of humour and an ability to sum up a whole life in a sentence.
In so far as the collection has a single subject, it is the character of those who make their homes in places such as Wyoming. By most standards, as Proulx would admit, the inhabitants of remote rural communities are pretty unattractive: they tend to be stubborn, narrow-minded, rabidly conservative and, fairly often, violent. Yet the peculiar conditions of the countryside make such failings seem less important than normal, and Proulx's writing reflects this. The big cleavage in her work is between those who respect and understand the countryside (towards whom she is sympathetic) and those who do not (of whom she disapproves). In Bad Dirt, establishing a rapport with the land becomes a means to atone for defects of character, a form of compensation for an unhappy life.
This idea is clearly illustrated in one of the best stories in the collection, "Man Crawling Out of Trees", about Mitchell Fair and Eugenie, a married couple from New York (he an architect, she an interior designer) who decide to move to Wyoming. Both are drawn to the idea of living in the countryside. However, there is a crucial difference between them: while Mitchell is actually interested in nature and falls "deeply in love with the pronghorn", Eugenie is interested in "the animals and birds" only as a "decorative novelty" - hers is essentially a city-dweller's view of rusticity. As the story progresses, the differences become insurmountable, and the marriage falls apart.
Mitchell is neither virtuous nor attractive, but he achieves a kind of dignity through his attachment to the land: Proulx writes of him experiencing "the most intense pleasure in being alone, in swallowing the landscape in great chunks". Eugenie, on the other hand, is diminished by her indifference. With characteristic dry wit, Proulx notes that when she leaves Mitchell and returns to New York, all Eugenie takes with her are the ideas for two new interior design concepts - "a cowboy kitchen for urban bachelors, and a kind of ranch kitchen with crossed branding irons over the raised hearth to replace the ultramodern German style".
