“On the main road his tire tracks showed as a faint pattern in the pearly apricot light from the risen moon, winking behind roiling clouds of snow.”
In this reconfiguration of an Icelandic folk tale, Proulx occupies territory I tend to discourage students from: having a character spend long periods alone; freighting the work with considerable backstory; employing character introspection rather than just narrating what’s happening. But the author’s genius of course renders such ‘rules’ irrelevant. Her protagonist journeys to the harsh, unforgiving American west to attend a funeral, a hostile landscape he’d escaped as a young man, one of decay, violence and inexorable legacy. At its heart, a story embedded in a story about the (mis)treatment of animals and a disillusionment with the pioneering American Dream.
Strangely, Proulx, in interviews, doesn’t much rate this one of hers. I think she’s wrong.
First published in The Atlantic, November 1997, and available to subscribers to read here; collected in Close Range: Wyoming Stories, Scribner, 1999
A Personal Anthology 