Rural and Restless

...Mother and daughter have renounced one another...

...This is a different kind of gossip, if that is even quite the word for it...

...the weak orange of civilization" by the lights of houses outlanders own now...

...The Hellhole has "a slightly soot-darkened circular depression marking the fatal entrance...

...Munro's understanding of the complexity of all things—not only the lure of romance and the desperation of loss, but the working-out of the having as well as the wanting—brings little to rejoice about...

...Quite straightforwardly, though with savage irony, it delivers two duplicitously married New Yorkers to Elk Tooth...

...It isn't private, which is to say secret, as it is in Munro...

...Proulx can write with equal perceptiveness and spirit about men and women, but there is no doubt that she leans toward the guys, favors the toughness of their outdoor work and their not so gentle ways...

...Munro's stories, from the very start, have emerged quietly but with profound candor from the world of small town Canadian women: their families, their love lives, their friendships and animosities...

...When, in love with an unlikely man, she herself suffers such a confusion, she faces the robbery of her very future with a rare equanimity...

...But since her own move to Wyoming, her real passion has been a blend of the comic absurd with a high serious love of a way of life currently under threat...

...Her characters' names are downright Dickensian: Orion Horncrackle, Creel Zmundzinski, Apollo Wham, Plato Bucklew, the Reverend Jefford Pecker...

...Consider the acute opening paragraph of "What Kind of Furniture Would Jesus Pick": "Sailing the sagebrush ocean, a traveler discovers isolated coves with trophy houses protected by electronic gates, or slanted trailers on waste ground, teetering rock formations and tilted cliffs, log houses unchanged from the 19th century except for the television dish...

...By the time the suite of stories is over, we have toured Munro's characteristic landscape: There is unblinking attention to social detail and class sensitivities, and a layer of Greek mythology not too insistently layered on...

...Both books brim with Proulx' brio (too foreign and fancy-pants a word for the red state where they take place...

...That gives her characters louder voices, more raucous relationships, a rousing appreciation for farming, ranching, traveling at high speeds down the endless highway...

...Before long, this little orifice in the earth turns out to be a convenient venue for the disappearance of many kinds of malefactors, lawyers first and foremost, with an IRS agent thrown in as an extra tidbit...

...Finally, their own shoddily shored-up marriage collapses in a flood of angry confession...

...They do what they do—make sudden and unexpected moves, confiding in no one, least of all themselves—and we are left to thumb through our Freud to try to decipher their motivations...

...The irritating Reverend Pecker gets sucked down a convenient "Hellhole" into the kind of brimstone that serves him right for threatening the warden, Creel...

...The house Mitchell and Eugenie buy is "designed in the grand rancho style of the 1980s, [which] featured a gargantuan living room, intricate long notches, the distant mountains fitted artfully into the vast window, against which birds broke their heads...

...No one is judged...

...Escapes...

...In her novels and in some of her best stories (see the widely anthologized "Brokeback Mountain," a poignant portrait of two gay cowboys) Proulx provides idiosyncratic men and women with believable lives, while they also act out roles in a larger sociological landscape...

...There is little more to it than being broke, proud, ingenious and setting your heels against civilized society's pull...

...And in the end the mysteries are solved, the pranks are forgiven, true love or something like it is rekindled, and those who were fooled have the good grace not to complain...

...Bad Dirt is subtitled Wyoming Stories 2. The first collection, Close Range, was published in 2000...

...The fact was surely that she had laughed too much around Penelope...

...because there are only two: There should certainly be more...

...No explanations are offered for the cosmic or mythic monikers, leaving us to wonder if they are being mocked as the earthly reduction of grand universal ambitions...

...Could anything be crueler than a mother forced to quiz herself like Juliet...

...or "Did you hear the one about...

...One young woman, the plain Robin of "Tricks," leaves her little town and little life to go once a year to see a Shakespeare play, where she is fascinated by the disguises, the conspiracies and masquerades, the exchanged twins and mistaken identities...

...they are not simply emblematic marauders, vile rapers of the glorious landscape...

...What makes this story so strong—in addition to the vigor of its writing—is that there is no simple oneon-one correlation between the newcomers who are despoiling the land and the poisoned communication between these two: They come to the scene flawed and all too real, but first they are convincing characters with their own reasons for being here in Elk Tooth...

...There was a faint sulfurous odor, not unlike that of the tap water in Zmundzinski's trailer kitchen back in Elk Tooth...

...And at the end of the extraordinary, intricate set of stories, "Chance," "Soon" and "Silence," Juliet, a girl turned wife and mother, is abandoned by her 20year-old daughter in a move that is beyond mysterious...

...In the other stories there is a girl claimed, for good reason, by a mother not hers...

...In more than one interview, asked where her ideas come from, she has simply answered, "Gossip...

...in the absence of Bowen's extra sex, maybe the word should be "ungendered...

...Her characters tend to live within the restraints that come with the limited territory of the provincial day-to-day...

...Reading Annie Proulx and Alice Munro side by side, I couldn't escape this mischievous thought...

...I hesitate to call them masculine, in opposition to the consistently female terrain of Munro's world...

...There is no religion here, but there is a profound and inarticulate hunger for meaning...

...Many years pass...

...Robin's brief romance is extinguished and she is left with nothing but the ash of a mystery solved too late...

...the second is a set of related stories that read like a miniversion of The Beggar Maid or Lives of Girls and Women, in which the years disappear in the interstices between them...

...Runaway combines two kinds of wholly enrapturing collections: In the first almost all the stories, though separate one from another, contain huge leaps oftime, entire compressed lives that others would make into novels...

...Since "things," she thinks, "are easily spoiled Shakespeare should have prepared her...

...There is a death reported in detail that has not taken place...

...She had been lacking in motherly inhibitions and propriety and selfcontrol...

...And it is surely not whispered, but proudly public, the celebration of shared (or threatened) values about work, the land, and about who belongs in the community and who does not...

...AS USUAL, the dominant emotion is regret, for opportunities seized as much as for those rejected...

...Proulx enjoys, and prods us to enjoy, these pokes in the ribs...

...The best, and most realistic, story in Bad Dirtis "Man Crawling Out of Trees...

...Those who missed seeing it have to depend on the reports of the fortunate few who were awake at that hour...

...She is remarkably good at the broad joke, the kind of story that could begin "Remember the time...

...this time, she is at the receiving end of the unexplained escape...

...With the exception of one story, "The Indian Wars Refought," which turns didactic when Linny, daughter of a "deIndianized" off-rez Oglala Sioux, becomes a mouthpiece for the virtues of re-Indianizing, Proulx does not let her anger and disappointment undermine the pleasure of her lively prose...

...Reviewed by Rosellen Brown Professor of English, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago...

...Then—shockingly and almost always without premeditation— they break through those boundaries into freedom...

...Bereft, after many years of hope she understands that the daughter who has disappeared (a bit like the daughter in fellow Canadian Carol Shields' Unless) has secretly striven for a kind of purity that her mother, who lives in the world, can only compromise...

...these are like self-abductions, kidnappings by their own hands...

...He is so happy to be back that he smokes a celebratory three packs and throws 14 burning cigarettes out the window, wreaking less than divine retribution this time: His "return was the closest thing to a meteor ever seen in Elk Tooth, his truck a great fiery cylinder hurtling through the darkness...

...But this should not put off a single reader: These are extraordinary examples of plot attendant only on character, accessible and humbling in their illustration of how simple the materials of great storytelling turn out to be...

...And so it goes: Everything Mitchell and Eugenie do offends the people among whom these Easterners have surfaced with the suddenness oftoxic mushrooms...

...But civilized society seems to be dragging with it hot tubs and home theaters...

...It "saved a great deal of tedious paperwork and became so popular that sometimes several Game & Fish trucks were lined up along the road waiting a turn at the facilities...

...Munro's people, for all their modesty, are presented with the peculiar reticence of Biblical characters whose inner lives are hardly under discussion...

...The themes ofher riveting new book are so tightly entwined that they beg a dissertation to deal fully with their echoes, their canny (Shakespearean) mirrorings...

...The difference, of course, is that in the comedies, all's well that ends well...

...Her loneliness is nearly unbearable to witness...

...author, "Haif a Heart," "Civil Wars" In one of her novels, Elizabeth Bowen provides a character with this provocative thought about a stranger who has caught her up in conversation: "She and I belong to the same sex...

...In Elk Tooth everyone tries to be a character and with some success...

...Just as too many things—personal things, loves that were maybe just gratification—had been tragedies...

...In this unforgivingly vast landscape, their illusions about their marriage and the viability of finding acceptance among their neighbors are dashed as unambiguously as those birds' heads...

...If they function as cautionary figures, as they do in "Man Crawling Out of Trees," that is not their only purpose...

...That freedom is typically represented by a man, met under unusual circumstances or already claimed by someone else, as she is herself...

...Too many things had been jokes...

...then Juliet, resigned, lets it all go...

...In the same tall tale spirit, though without the aid of the supernatural, Deb Sipple, in "The Trickle Down Effect," beats an impending rain and pushes the speed limit driving his rig full of newly bought dry hay toward home...

...although many years later they might repent their lunges for freedom, none is praised, few are punished...

...Since she actually resembles no one, except for the modesty of her voice and the refusal to judge her characters, she deserves to be described as original...

...Alice Munro is writing these days under what must feel like the weight of too many comparisons to Chekhov to be comfortable...

...Juliet imagines Penelope as a girl called Charicleia, who is carried off, leaving her mother to search and mourn, until she works a reconciliation as the "great-hearted" Queen of Ethiopia...

...Proulx, in contrast, captures life on the broad, open—nearly empty—plains of Wyoming...

...For once it is not the protagonist herself who has bolted toward a new life (though she too had done that, when she was young...

...All, or much, of Wyoming is "stained...