This may seem like an author's voice rather than a character's, but one of Proulx's talents is to make the distinction irrelevant. She grapples herself to her people with such authentic language that when poetry turns up, the grapple holds and they unforcedly elevate. The strength of this collection is Proulx's feeling for place and the shape into which it twists her characters. Wyoming is harsh spaces, unyielding soil, deadly winters, blistering summers and the brute effort of wresting a living out of a land as poor as it is beautiful. Character is not fate.
Fate is character and landscape is fate.
One young man gives up college and goes back to ranch work when his decrepit truck dies and there is no way to cover the distance. The violent and the violated inhabit ''Close Range,'' often in the same person. 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.