Book Review: "Close Range: Wyoming Stories" by Annie Proulx

Close Range: Wyoming Stories (1999)
Annie Proulx (1935)
283 pages

In Annie Proulx’s collection of short stories Close Range: Wyoming Stories, the state’s rugged rangelands not only provide the setting, but also play a central role in events. The farmstead owners and ranch hands in these stories find themselves in an often bitter struggle against a land prone to extremes; and, those who escape to the city or the far-flung rodeo circuit fair little better, indelibly connected to the land they have left behind.

Proulx (/ˈpruː/, I had to look it up...) characterizes the unremitting force of this land at the heart of all of these stories in the powerful opening lines of People in Hell Just Want a Drink of Water, a tale of two families who arrive to Wyoming from elsewhere in the country looking for a fresh start, and who, through inscrutable twists of fate, come to cross paths in a violent reckoning of frontier justice:

You stand there, braced. Cloud shadows race over the buff rock stacks as a projected film, casting a queasy, mottled ground rash. The air hisses and it is no local breeze but the great harsh sweep of wind from the turning of the earth. The wild country – indigo jags of mountain, grassy plain everlasting, tumbled stones like fallen cities, the flaring roll of sky – provokes a spiritual shudder. It is like a deep note that cannot be heard but is felt, it is like a claw in the gut.
Dangerous and indifferent ground: against its fixed mass the tragedies of people count for nothing although the signs of misadventure are everywhere. No past slaughter nor cruelty, no accident nor murder that occurs on the little ranches or at the isolate crossroads with their bare populations of three or seventeen, or in the reckless trailer courts of mining towns delays the flood of morning light. Fences, cattle, roads, refineries, mines, gravel pits, traffic lights, graffiti’d celebration of athletic victory on bride overpass, crust of blood on the Wal-Mart loading dock, the sun-faded wreaths of plastic flowers marking death on the highway are ephemeral. Other cultures have camped here a while and disappeared. Only earth and sky matter. Only the endlessly repeated flood of morning light. You begin to see that God does not owe us much beyond that. (97)

The opening story of the collection, The Half-Skinned Steer, features an octogenarian who left Wyoming as a young man, escaping his father’s struggling ranch and never going back. Learning of the death of his brother, who had remained home and taken over the ranch, he decides to drive for the funeral, from his east coast home. The trip leaves plenty of time for his thoughts to drift into a morass of recollections about his last days on the ranch; but, as he at last approaches his boyhood home, his dark reminiscences become manifest in a natural world that seems to rise up to greet him.

Many readers will recognize the final story in the collection from the well-known film it spawned of the same title: Brokeback Mountain. Two down-on-their-luck ranch hands in their late teens hire on “as herder and camp tender” (254) for a sheep operation; the pair are tasked with herding the sheep up into the summer grazing lands on the eponymous range while keeping their charges safe from predators. Having first met when they hired in, they come to find each other welcome companions, and as the summer goes on the isolated meadows allow their intimacy to grow in ways that surprise both of them, and that leaves them profoundly connected well beyond that summer. They struggle to adapt to their subsequent lives off the mountain, however, in a society that would violently react to knowledge of their relationship.

The tension between the pair’s relationship and the expectations of the community they live in highlights a theme that runs through many of the stories in this collection. As Proulx writes in Pair a Spurs, Wyoming’s stark and unpredictable landscape has bred a stubbornly resilient populace, one that has adopted an “unwritten motto, take care a your own damn self” (149). But this celebrated independent streak only goes so far – stray outside the bounds of expected behavior and the community will all too quickly engage aggressively in your business, your independence be damned.

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Other notes and information:

The book is sprinkled through with a half dozen or so gorgeous painting by William Matthews, such as the one below.

 

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Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf

Book Review: "Small Wonder" by Barbara Kingsolver

Small Wonder (2002)
Barbara Kingsolver (1955)
269 pages

Traumatic events have a way of focusing the mind, revealing to a person what really matters to them. For author Barbara Kingsolver, the terrorist attacks of 9/11 appear to have had just such a clarifying impact. Asked the following day “to write a response” to them, she ended up producing several essays that together helped her process the horror of what happened by examining connections to the larger challenges and complexities of our present day, global civilization. The resulting pieces, along with others that followed and some earlier essays that touched on the same issues, eventually came together in the book Small Wonder.

Kingsolver reveals the themes that tie together the broad range of topics in this collection, and her goal in addressing them, in the eponymous opening essay: 

Political urgencies come and go, but it’s a fair enough vocation to strike one match after another against the dark isolation, when spectacular arrogance rules the day and tries to force hope into hiding. (21) 

In each essay, Kingsolver strives to “raise up a yell across the fence” on issues typically shrouded and clouded by ignorance and often bad faith arguments. Her knowledge and concern ranges widely, from the continued environmental degradation of our planet to the tragic short- and long-term devastation that war imparts on the vanquished – as well as the putative victors, from the risks of modern agricultural practices to the false narratives around poverty in the U.S.

The intersection of the environment and agri-business takes center stage in A Fist in the Eye of God, in which Kingsolver explores the dangers of genetically modified seeds. She dismisses as short-sighted the typical arguments made in their support: their supposed importance for feeding the world’s growing population, and the claim that they pose no health concerns; such assertions, she argues, fail to acknowledge the dangers of the loss of genetic diversity caused by the shift to manufactured seeds. Over millennia, plants have developed a built-in robustness to changing conditions – in years that are cooler or hotter, calmer or windier than others, the genetic variation in natural seeds will mean that some percentage will grow into plants that can survive in such conditions. By contrast, while GMO seeds may have greater productivity in a normal year, they will be less capable of adapting to the vagaries of the climate over the long run.

Compounding this lack of robustness to varying conditions, some producers of such seeds have maneuvered to protect their investment by adding genetic modifications that don’t allow the resulting plant to create viable seeds. She points out that farmers using such seed cannot follow the ancient practice of holding back a portion of their harvest for the next year’s planting; instead, they need to buy new seeds each year. Thus, farmers must earn sufficient money from the current crop to afford the next year’s, leading to another kind of lack of robustness for farmers, as a bad crop year or falling harvest prices can leave them unable to pay for the new seed. This tension between the profit focus of seed manufacturers and its impacts on farmers is part of a larger dynamic succinctly captured by Colin Tudge, in his book The Time Before History: 5 Million Years of Human Impact: “... the agricultural systems of the [modern] world are not actually designed to feed people.”

For Kingsolver, the bottom line is that, given the bountiful outcome provided by nature after millennia of evolution, humankind should take care “to enter the doors of creation not with a lion tamer’s whip and chair, but with … reverence.” (108)

In the essay Marking a Passage, Kingsolver turns to her hometown and her vocation as a writer, lamenting the closing of a local, beloved, independent bookstore, one that she notes was important in the success of her first novel. Her description of “those sad last weeks of its closing sale” (221) reminded me of my own feelings at the loss of such a bookstore I had long frequented, Shaman Drum. Right up to the end, I was, as Kingsolver writes, “banking on a miracle” (221) that it remain open; I recall asking the cashier almost pleadingly, as I paid closing sale prices for some books, If I pay full price will it enable you to stay in business?.

Linking the shuttering of her favored local bookstore to broader societal implications, Kingsolver makes a plea to put “an extra dollar or two back into our hometown’s economy, rather than sending it off to a distant, faceless conglomerate.” (220) It can feel quixotic to fight back against the rise of such “conglomerates,” but her arguments resonated with me. I have my own small way of pushing back on them: using the Amazon search engine to look up information about a book, but then jumping over to my local bookstore’s website to order the book from them – really, how often does one need next day delivery on a book?

Across the essays collected in Small Wonder, Kingsolver touches on environmental, political, and social topics that continue to roil the world today, two decades after these essays first appeared. Generally, she begins locally, setting the stage by describing a very personal scene or moment around or outside her home, or on a trip she has taken into nature, before pivoting to explore the global concerns it implicates. Thus, her daughter’s discovery on a vacation trip to the beach that a beautiful shell she had hoped to add to her collection still has its hermit crab occupant becomes a mediation on the too often willful neglect of concern for animals; and, visits to the Yucatan peninsula and to the wild Pacific coast of Costa Rica become jumping off points to describe the loss of wilderness forest and critical animal habitat, respectively.

As a trained biologist, Kingsolver brings a strong, technical training to accompany her wonderful abilities as a writer. This combination enables her essays to be persuasive clarion calls for change in how we treat both the natural world and one another, presented within engaging prose at once demanding and compassionate. In more than one essay she acknowledges her own challenges and imperfections in fully abiding by the way of life she calls us to.

Our religious and cultural heritage is to deny, for all we’re worth, that we’re in any way connected with the rest of life on earth. We don’t come from it, we’re not part of it; we own it and were put down here to run the place. It’s deeply threatening to our ideology, at the corporate and theological levels, to admit that we’re constrained by the laws of biology. (226)

Ultimately, however, she returns consistently to her key message: we must all constantly strive to treat our world as a gift that requires our care, not a personal play pen for us to exploit.

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Other notes and information:

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Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf

Book Review: "Termination Shock" by Neal Stephenson

Termination Shock (2021)
Neal Stephenson (1959)
708 pages

A recently released report of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change makes disturbingly clear that nations have failed to take the actions necessary to address global warming, with UN Secretary-General António Guterres lamenting “a litany of broken climate promises.”   Certainly, the debate in the United States over climate change has become so filled with rancor and bad faith arguments that little, if any, nuanced public – or political –discussion about it (or much else, it must be said) appears possible. Globally, while the question of the reality of climate change may be less divisive than in the US, the political will to act has been, for the most part, just as weak.

In his novel Termination Shock, author Neal Stephenson projects this lack of political engagement on reducing greenhouse gas emissions as persisting into the coming decades, even as the resulting impacts continue to worsen. He also portrays the governmental abrogation of responsibility as symptomatic of a broader unwillingness of politicians to control the actions of the rich and powerful, particularly in the U.S.

As a consequence, even as rising temperatures leave parts of the world increasingly inhospitable, and rising sea levels threaten ever more islands and coastal regions, Stephenson imagines countries leaving it to their populations to find ways to cope, particularly in the dogmatically free-market Western economies. The novel in fact turns on the idea that, in an environment of government inaction and free-market ideological dominance, some among the wealthy elite will decide to take matters into their own hands. Not surprisingly, they will justify their engagement by creating for themselves a narrative for action that deftly combines humanitarian concern over the global impacts of climate change with an opportunity to profit by addressing them.

Precisely such reasoning motivates the character T. R. Schmidt, an enterprising, in-your-face billionaire from Texas who’s made his money from “a vastly successful regional chain of family restaurants cum-mega-truck-stops.” (141) Schmidt decides to implement a geoengineering approach to countering the immediate effects of climate change while longer-term strategies for reducing CO2 emissions are developed. He unabashedly declares his motives as a mix of Somebody’s got to do something now! and the opportunity to maintain his profit margins by finding a way for people – especially in his part of the US – to continue a lifestyle of profligate energy use that supports his business interests.

The story opens as Schmidt pulls together a group of leaders whom he hopes will support his efforts out of a shared interest in avoiding sea level rise. Realizing he cannot engage government officials, hamstrung as they are by national political realities, he turns to powerful global elites who wield significant economic and political influence in places threatened by rising seas, such as The Netherlands, Venice, London and Singapore. He brings them together in southern Texas at the site of an operation he has built for executing his geoengineering plan, hoping that being present to view the initial launch of his project will convince them of its viability, and so to join him in expanding it world-wide.

Of course, altering the climate through geoengineering, despite being just as human-induced as the problem of climate change itself, leaves in place the fundamental dynamic that some will benefit while others suffer – it only shifts which parts of the world fall into each camp. And so, as TR spins up his efforts, he must contend with those who feel that they will be negatively impacted, and who will therefore go to great lengths to stop him. The story develops toward an inevitable confrontation as TR and his supporters contend with attacks from those arrayed against them.

Stephenson’s approach to the story in Termination Shock has similarities to an earlier novel of his that I’ve read, seveneves; each has a long, relatively deliberate – if still action-filled – build-up laying the groundwork for a dramatic climax, and each provides science and engineering geeks with fairly detailed explanations of the technology involved. In seveneves, the first two-thirds of the story is set in our near future, describing an existential cataclysm that fundamentally alters our biological and social future, before a reader turns the page to encounter a chapter titled Five Thousand Years Later, and discovers the world that has arisen as a consequence. I found that story brilliant: engaging, exciting, and ultimately thrilling the imagination. (My review linked to at right.)

In a similar way, the first two-thirds of Termination Shock set the stage for the inevitable conflict, which then plays out quickly. The entire story takes place over a period of a few years, several decades from now, and while it opens with a bang – a dramatic plane crash – it then becomes an odd mix of adventure and long, drawn out set-up. I found myself enjoying the story, but also constantly waiting for it to take off, in some sense; and, when it finally reaches its climactic moment, I found it a bit underwhelming given the long build up.

Stephenson’s setting of the novel in our near future, and its theme of humankind’s reaction to the threats of global warming reminded me of another novel set in the same time frame and dealing with the same issues: Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future, which I read just a few months ago. (My review linked to at right.) Both stories imagine a world muddling through the next few decades, unable to marshal an effective, global response to the threat of climate change.

However, whereas in Stephenson’s story this results in a wealthy few implementing a particular geoengineering technology, Robinson portrays a world in which a broad variety of technical and economic approaches are explored by groups of all kinds, from governments to industries, private individuals to terrorist organizations, all of it largely uncoordinated and with mixed results. Appropriately, both stories end with the future uncertain; but the chaotic hodgepodge of climate related actions Robinson imagines in his story seem the more likely scenario as, in the face of climate related disasters, citizens of many countries not only take action themselves, but also finally force political institutions to act.

Nonetheless, Stephenson’s Termination Shock delivers readers action playing out on a global scale, while exploring the existential threat to civilization of climate change and the inherent challenges of using geoengineering approaches to address its impacts.

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Other notes and information:

A well-done graphic on the evolution of Earth's temperature over the past 22,000 years at XKCD.

 

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Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf