Proulx conveys sensibility, but she does it from the outside. The comfortable America of a rising stock market and a falling awareness of whatever lives outside its concerns cannot even conceive of it. Proulx knows what she could only know not just by living in Wyoming but by the infrared that allows a very few writers clear sight in the dark of the imagination. I rather have a greasy little girl than a lonesome baby,'' he explains. The author's understanding is at its most remarkable in the astonishing ''Brokeback Mountain,'' the story of a sudden flare-up of sexual passion between two ranch hands herding 1,000 sheep in summer upland pasture.
All life is equally and strangely life.
Annie Proulx has only published novels up to now, and in a foreword she tells of uncertainty about the shorter form. In fact, the difficulty with several of the pieces is the opposite of what short-story writers often encounter when they attempt a novel. It is the problem not of sustaining the story but of compressing it. Her solution in several of the stories is to impose a labored climactic rhythm or a gotcha ending. A Lonely Coast,'' with its sensitive account of the difficult lives of single women in a rough rural world, tacks on a violent and didactic conclusion.