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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
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Rating:  17 reviews
Sales Rank: 2778
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
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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...
 Every Bit As Exquisitely Written And Enjoyable As Past Works - But Different November 21, 2008
Annie Proulx continues her mastery of the short story.
In Fine Just the Way It Is: Wyoming Stories 3, Proulx once again gives us stories primarily taking place in or associated with Wyoming. Her characters are terribly human--warts and all--and her stories are typically blunt, to the point, and full of (sometimes brief) life.
But, as straightforward as her stories are with their plainspoken characters, Proulx also delivers stunningly beautiful narrative language when detailing landscapes, flora, and animal life. Some of her imagery literally astounded me it was so well crafted and provocative.
However, unlike previous Wyoming volumes, this addition to the series is far more brutal to its characters. Now Proulx has never occurred to me as a woman who gets overly sentimental about her creations, but I was surprised at the tragedies she forced her men and women to endure. That being said, she certainly did not cross the line into sensationalism; everything she threw at her characters was well within reality's parameters.
Well, for the most part.
I was especially happy that in three stories in particular, Proulx exits her normally grounded repertoire and gives us something bordering fantasy. Now, because it's Proulx, we're not talking Tolkien here, but two of her stories hilariously focus on the devil and the other, well, I don't want to spoil anything, but it features a sagebrush where mysterious disappearances persist. I think that with her particular style and sensibilities, calling them tall tales may be more appropriate than fantasy.
Consequently, I sensed a real sense of dark humor in these stories, and I loved it! While most of the stories were very serious in terms of subject matter, they all utilized a morose fun that--unless happening to us--demanded a chuckle or two.
All in all, this collection was a bit of a break from Proulx in terms of style, especially when read between the lines, but every bit as exquisitely written and enjoyable as past works.
Proulx's talent is unrelenting with each new work she releases.
~Scott William Foley, author of The Imagination's Provocation: Volume II
 Too Harsh For Me November 18, 2008
Dear Folks,
I have read all of Annie Proulx's books and it seems that this set of stories was just to grim for my taste. I love her writing, compostion of prose and word use. Usually I read with a dictionary close at hand. Perhaps I am just a whimp, but once in a while it would be nice to read one her stories and find what I would term a "happy" ending. I must be getting old and grumpy. I realize that she is writing about the old West and that is the way things happened, but my stomach just wasn't in it this time around.
proofreading November 18, 2008
I really love reading books by Annie Proulx. The words she uses and the structure of her sentences are so wonderful that, unlike most books, I actually read every word, apparently, unlike her editor. In the first paragraph, page 8 of Family Man we find RAY Forkenbrock "squinting against the slanting ice" - nice sentence. However, in the last paragraph of the same page I guess either Annie has decided to use the nickname ROY for RAY or someone didn't bother proofreading the segment. Nitpicking for sure, but when a book costs $25.00 you'd think some kind of care might be taken in getting the words right.
 Wyoming is Better than Hell November 12, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Annie Proulx's latest collection of stories from Wyoming, Fine Just The Way It Is, also includes two bits about Hell; Wyoming may be better than Hell, but just barely, and only because it is so much less populated. Hell, together with Satan and his sidekick Duane Fork, provide most of the humor in this collection. The other stories are heavy in misery but not overweight. Proulx has a perfect touch with the miserable truth about things: her skill with stories is that she is neither condescending towards her characters nor overdone for her readers. The pitch in all the stories is just about perfect, although the one piece set back in the time of a Native American buffalo hunt was steeped in bathos and pathos, as well as blood and tears.
The loveliest story in the collection, with its own rhythm, underlining harmony, and a final succinct coda is "Them Old Cowboy Songs". "Tits Up in A Ditch" is such pure misery I hate to say I liked it but I did. "Testimony of the Donkey" was well-laid and carefully built up and quietly moving, as if it were a real story told by someone to me at the kitchen table, Shipping News sugar and cream laden tea between us, and with a big question left at the end: illusion or reality?
Speaking of Shipping News, and I always do when I talk about Annie Proulx, it is one of the best novels I've ever read. These short stories keep my admiration for her fully stoked.
For more reviews check out[...]
 End of the affair . . . November 4, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This book is a mishmash of different story styles, and not all of them as successful as the author's trademark accounts of life in the American West (past and present). There are three good examples of that genre here, and they surely must mark the end of her affair with Wyoming. Her usual grimly comic vision, still harboring a bit of romance for far-flung places and people living on the margins, has gone "tits up in a ditch" in this third collection of her western stories.
What might have been tragic ironies that resonate in the heart, as we find them in "Brokeback Mountain," have now evolved into outright despair. Moments of joy are so fleeting they barely have a chance to live and breathe before they die in the face of bad luck and life's cruelties. It would be hard to find anywhere a portrayal of life on the frontier (then and now) that attempts more openly to reduce the myth of pioneer spirit to a living nightmare. Reading this book I was reminded of the Richard Avedon photos of the people of the West, beaten down and ravaged, barely hanging on to their dignity. This is an American West rarely found in fiction since Dorothy Scarborough's "The Wind." Not recommended for anybody whose heroes have always been cowboys.
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