Home on the Range

Guardian Unlimited Books | Review | Profile: Annie Proulx

" ... she had also established an obsessively researched method of working: Every phrase is earned, double-earned, triple-earned. She conducts multiple interviews, about knife-grinding, for example, that may result in only a sentence; she keeps lists of names, from phone books, help-wanted ads (displaying a distinct taste for the unusual); she goes to every place she describes, painting watercolours of landscapes in order to fix them in her mind; collects impressions always, in case they are someday useful: "I have scores of different skies to draw on - I go to sky descriptions that have been written from the real skies that I see and pick out the one that works for me." She writes in longhand, because she believes writing on a computer produces facile prose."

"... Perhaps it is this intensity that brings many to the conclusion that the short story is really her medium; in Close Range, the Wyoming-themed collection that followed Accordion Crimes , she is appreciably more at home. "I think she writes some of the bravest short fiction I know," says Goldman. "She has made the American short story new." Proulx's attempt to explain the attraction is revealing: in the brevity of the short story, she says, "lies the scope, or the possibility of allowing something to be truthful or brutal. There are some wonderful short novels though, that manage to have a strange and excellent harshness." "