In her relatively short fiction career, Annie Proulx has been lauded by international critics, laureled with awards from the Pulitzer to the National Book, and anthologized in the Best American Short Stories of the Century . And now, a true sign of Arrival, she's being staged by Word for Word. I'm not being sarcastic. It may be the best thing that's happened to her. When the story gets going, you think it'll be some kind of routine about a naive and lonely farmer's daughter who runs off to the city, but what happens instead is that Ottaline strikes up a friendship with a broken, talking tractor.
Tractors are sensitive to such things, apparently.
They get a lot of ass and play favorites. But before anything serious can happen with the tractor, Ottaline meets and marries a cattle dealer named Flyby Amendinger. The story lopes, veers suddenly, and hardly bothers with suspense. It has long stretches of slack exposition, which Word for Word can't improve, so reading the story beforehand is a good idea. But the company can shape Proulx's language and emphasize her poker-faced humor.