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| Fine Just the Way It Is: Wyoming Stories 3 | 
 enlarge | Author: Annie Proulx
Publisher: Scribner
Category: Book
List Price: $25.00
Buy New: $13.25
You Save: $11.75 (47%)
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Avg. Customer Rating:  17 reviews
Sales Rank: 1992
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 240
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 9.5 x 6.4 x 1.1
ISBN: 1416571663
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9781416571667
ASIN: 1416571663
Publication Date: September 9, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
Returning to the territory of "Brokeback Mountain" (in her first volume of Wyoming Stories) and Bad Dirt (her second), National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize winner Annie Proulx delivers a stunning and visceral new collection. In Fine Just the Way It Is, she has expanded the limits of the form. Her stories about multiple generations of Americans struggling through life in the West are a ferocious, dazzling panorama of American folly and fate. "Every ranch...had lost a boy," thinks Dakotah Hicks as she drives through "the hammered red landscape" of Wyoming, "boys smiling, sure in their risks, healthy, tipped out of the current of life by liquor and acceleration, rodeo smashups, bad horses, deep irrigation ditches, high trestles, tractor rollovers and 'unloaded' guns. Her boy, too...The trip along this road was a roll call of grief." Proulx's characters try to climb out of poverty and desperation but get cut down as if the land itself wanted their blood. Deeply sympathetic to the men and women fighting to survive in this harsh place, Proulx turns their lives into fiction with the power of myth -- and leaves the reader in awe. The winner of two O. Henry Prizes, Annie Proulx has been anthologized in nearly every major collection of great American stories. Her bold, inimitable language, her exhilarating eye for detail and her dark sense of humor make this a profoundly compelling collection.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 12 more reviews...
 not quite at the close range/bad dirt level September 8, 2008
7 out of 8 found this review helpful
Proulx' Close Range and Bad Dirt are both solid 5-star works. Not all the stories rate 5 stars, but most do, and the rest almost all get 4 stars. Some of the stories, such as Brokeback Mountain and Wamsutter Wolf, will leave deep and lasting impressions--much like Conrad's novella The Duel. In Fine Just the Way It Is, there are some very memorable pieces, but the proportion of 5-star stories is less than in those other two books. As with Bad Dirt, some of the stories are whimsical/fantasy, some are humorous, some are serious. You won't see the Elk City bars, you won't see Warden Zmundzinski (which is too bad!).
For me, the best--and strangest (at the end you'll pause to think over what you've just read)--is the Sagebrush Kid, about a large and sometimes decorated sagebrush bush in a remote area of the state. Nearby people and animals have the habit of disappearing--as the story notes, a small Bermuda Triangle in Wyoming. Family man (the lead story) is more your traditional Proulx excellent writing--about an old cowboy in a nursing home with a family secret to reveal to his granddaughter. It's a wonderful bleak view of the hard Wyoming life, where death comes in many forms: the cowboy regrets not having frozen to death on the range rather than waste away in the nursing home. One of the stories (saying which might be a spoiler) reminded me of Peter Stark's chilling "Last Breath" about different ways to die (or come very close to it) in nature--such as dehydration, freezing, being stung by box jellyfish, etc.
Overall, then, of the 9 stories here, I'd give a solid 5 stars to 3, and probably lesser ratings to the others. The others are good, but those three in particular make this book worthwhile.
 "That was the trouble with Wyoming; everything you ever did or said kept pace with you right to the end." September 10, 2008
6 out of 12 found this review helpful
When it comes to description, Annie Proulx is undoubtedly one of the best and most unique writers out there. With her blunt, unsparing prose, a fierce intellect and a coal black sense of humor, Proulx can paint a vivid and stark portrait of American life, and nowhere is this on better display than in her Wyoming Stories, where the hardscrabble existences of her characters go hand in hand with the bleak words used to describe them. Here's how she introduces one of her characters in "Them Old Cowboy Songs": "Archie had a face as smooth as a skinned aspen, his lips barely incised on the surface as though scratched in with a knife." There's a paragraph from "The Half-Skinned Steer" in Close Range : Wyoming Stories, the first installment of the Wyoming series, which still gives me the chills years after I first read it.
Proulx's descriptive power is, primarily, what keeps me coming back to the Wyoming stories, even though neither of the sequels has been able to match the power of "Close Range" (which also has the distinction of birthing "Brokeback Mountain," the story the movie was based on). To tell the truth, each installment pales in comparison to the one that preceded it. Proulx has a fascination for fantasy elements that pop up in her stories that doesn't entirely suit her style (at least not when she's writing about the devil, who puts in a whopping two appearances in "Fine Just the Way it is"). "The Sagebrush Kid," about a man-eating, giant-size sage plant, captures something of a Twilight Zone vibe that makes it work, and still almost the entire middle section of this collection is taken up with the weakest form of Proulx's writing. Compare this to only one out-there story in Bad Dirt: Wyoming Stories 2, and hardly any in Close Range.
The bookends of "Fine Just the Way it is" are where it truly shines, and sure enough those stories are the ones that play to the intention of the Wyoming stories the best: slice-of-life vignettes that capture the essence of the hard living in such a violent, unpredictable location and the tough breed of human that it takes to live there. "Family Man" opens the collection by spotlighting Ray Forkenbrock, closing out his life in a retirement home and wondering just where the honor in his existence has gone, if there ever was any. Proulx closes it with "Tits-up in a Ditch," about naive young Dakotah Lister, who enlists in the army and gets sent to Iraq after a failed marriage leaves her with no job prospects and no way to pay for the son her soon-to-be-ex husband left her with. While there are some winning moments in between, it is these stories that are the real winners in this collection. Aside from the fantasy element that bogs down at least three of the stories, "Deep-Blood-Greasy-Bowl" feels like a research project more than a story (indeed, Proulx pauses to explain that the impetus of the story was the discovery of an ancient fire-pit on her property and the research into Indian buffalo hunting that followed).
All in all, this is an uneven collection for Proulx, a supremely talented writer who may have been looking to shake things up a touch in her third visit to the Wyoming territory.
Grade: C+
Three Cheers -- and 4 stars -- for Annie Proulx September 5, 2008
5 out of 6 found this review helpful
She makes me laugh, and cry, and think. I own and have re-read both Close Range and Bad Dirt and I curled up with Fine Just The Way It Is as soon as it arrived from Amazon. It will be read again in the future, just as the other two will be. The people in her Wyoming stories are clearly defined and clearly Wyoming people and yet I recognize in them people I have known in the Midwest, the South, and on the West Coast. No one writes short stories like Annie Proulx and if, like some I know, you don't like short stories because you want a nice long story rather than just a piece of a story, try Annie Proulx; you might be surprised how complete a short story can be.
 How Wyoming Was Won September 7, 2008
5 out of 6 found this review helpful
Ms. Proulx is the author of "The Shipping News" (1999) and two former collections of short stories about the Wyoming frontier: "Close Range" (1999) and "Bad Dirt" (2004). This third edition of tales about Wyoming spans from the pioneers to a veteran of "Eye-rack" in the present day. These are not uplifting stories, just as "Brokeback Mountain" from the first collection of stories was not uplifting. They are tales of persons playing the hands they are dealt -- and the hands are not very good. But her characters play out their fate the best they can, just like real people. Thought the stories could be read in a single sitting, they should be read over several evenings for them to be savored.
The way it is... September 14, 2008
5 out of 6 found this review helpful
Best know as the author of "Brokeback mountain," Ms.Proulx is a master story teller and exceptional writer. In some ways I think it is too bad her main claim to fame my keep some from reading her other stories. I thought Brokeback was a worthy story but it is by no means my favorite of this author. This third addition to the Wyoming stories is just as excellent as the first two. These stories cover the range of human emotion from clever to crude to tragic. The failings of the human is exposed by the rugged bleak Wyoming landscape. My favorite in this collection is "Tits up in a ditch" about a veteran of the Iraq war who returns home to her family carrying the emotional scars of her experience. This story was hard to read as it tore at my insides. It made me wonder if the author actually knew this person? It seemed so real. This one of the strengths of Proulx, you totally believe she is writing about real people. Do your self and take a trip through Wyoming with Ms, Proulx.
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