Hell's Bottom, Colorado
Winner of the Milkweed National Fiction Prize, Pritchett's debut is an admirable, steely-eyed collection of stories and vignettes featuring a family of ranchers in mountain-shadowed Colorado. Pritchett, raised a rancher herself, writes beautifully about the hard work and casual cruelty of ranch life. Forest fires, stillborn animals, poverty, cold and violence: all play as significant a role in the shaping of these characters as their emotionally hardscrabble family life. The three family groups that form the collection's core are brought uneasily together by an act of violence: the murder by her own husband, Ray of Rachel, youngest daughter of stubborn matriarch Renny. Some of the finest writing is in the stories about Rachel's children, Billy and Jess: "A Fine White Dust" chillingly illustrates their relationship with Rachel's abusive husband, and in "Dry Roots," one of the most painful and evocative stories, Billy and Jess come upon a horribly mutilated calf the property of a vicious neighbor and must make the decision to end its suffering. Pritchett's emotional revelations are often painted with broad strokes, as when Ben and Anita, estranged brother and sister, agree "that devastation looks pretty damn good from afar." But just as often, the writing is redeemed by fierce tenderness: "The wheat is starting to turn, flashes of deep gold streaking through tall, waving green....I suspect most city-folk... don't realize that wheat grows up green and living and then it dies, and that's when it becomes useful." Fans of Annie Proulx's Close Range: Wyoming Stories and Jon Billman's When We Were Wolves should enjoy this visceral, accomplished collection.Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.