Book Review

By Derryll White

Proulx, Annie (2004).  Bad Dirt – Wyoming Stories.

Some readers might consider this an older work, except that Annie Proulx never gets old.  Her strong feelings for, and portrayal of, the Wyoming landscape places the reader in the centre of her world.  The characters that people this collection of short stories are strong individuals formed in part by that same landscape.

Most of Proulx’s characters run up against the crushing weight of change – cowboy country being battered by changing weather patterns, crushed by economics, polluted by methane gas extraction.  It leads this reader to reflect on the changing pressures of language today, political correctness and a world dividing further due to extreme conservatism.  Really – ‘What Kind of Furniture Would Jesus Pick?’ – read it.

‘Florida Rental’, the last story in the collection, contains a surprise that will make every reader laugh.  Amanda Gribb, a bartender who appears in several stories, shows the qualities needed to succeed in Wyoming.  She is strong, inventive and takes no prisoners.  Bad Dirt is a great collection that shows Annie Proulx at her best.

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Excerpts from the book:

SIOUX REZ – But the recitation had moved Charlie Parrott.  He wondered if his mother were still alive.  A memory of the reservation came unbidden, a blistering day, the sky white and dry, heat waves trembling above the junk cars, one of them where a woman named Mona plied her trade.  Nothing moved, no dogs, no people, no lift of wind stirring the dust and trash.  He recalled the awful boredom of the place, the hopeless waiting for nothing.  He shuddered.

WYOMNG – Sailing the sagebrush ocean, a traveller discovers isolated cover with trophy houses protected by electronic gates, or slanted trailers on waste ground, teetering rock formations and tilted cliffs, log houses unchanged from the nineteenth century except for the television dish.

COFFEE – He surrounded himself with an atmosphere of affronted hostility as if he’d just been insulted, but balanced it with a wild and boisterous laugh, which erupted at inappropriate times.  He was addicted to what he called “hammer coffee,” strong enough to dissolve the handle, float the head.

CHANGE – He Had gone to grade school with May – she was then May Alwen – in the old century during the postwar fifties, the Eisenhower era of interstate highway construction that changed Wyoming forever by letting in the outside.

WYOMING’S INVASION – Some of these rich people, heated with land fever and the thought of a bargain, came to Gilbert and offered to buy his ranch.  He could see in their eyes how they planned to bulldoze the house and build mansions with guest cottages.  Guest cottages seemed reprehensible to him.

– Derryll White once wrote books but now chooses to read and write about them.  When not reading he writes history for the web at www.basininstitute.org.

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