Fine Just the Way It Is: Wyoming Stories 3 - Annie Proulx

The main character in the nine heart-stopping stories of Fine Just The Way It Is (Scribner, $25), is Wyoming. No one knows the region better than Annie Proulx, and she infuses her fiction with the geography, geology, flora, and fauna of the American West. Her characters are die-hards and schemers, hard-workers and losers. From early Native Americans living by catching buffalo, 19th-century settlers trying to survive on hope and cowboy songs, Depression-era homesteaders running out of hope, and on to contemporary youth with few options but joining the army and serving in Iraq, the region offers at best a hard and short life. If the harsh economic situation or the brutal weather doesn’t get you, your own poor judgment will. Yet Proulx is always sympathetic to her characters; these stories are rich and compelling, with much to offer in place of the romantic illusions of the unlimited frontier they leave trampled in the dust.