Close Range: Wyoming Stories.

• Author: Bakopoulos, Dean

Close Range: Wyoming Stories by Annie Proulx Scribner. 288 pages. $25.00.

The American West has been a favorite setting for many of the heavyweights of contemporary fiction: Cormac McCarthy, Rick Bass, Jim Harrison, Ivan Doig, and Richard Ford. Women who set their stories in Big Sky country (Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho) have not received the same critical acclaim and publishing hullabaloo as their male counterparts.

Enter Annie Proulx. She has only five books in print--including Heart Songs and Other Stories (1988), Postcards (1992), The Shipping News (1993), and Accordion Crimes (1996), all published by Scribner. Even so, Proulx has already won the Pen/Faulkner Award (for Postcards), as well as the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize (both for The Shipping News).

Her second collection of short stories, Close Range: Wyoming Stories, entertains the mythic legends of drunken cowboys, rodeo heroes, betrayed lovers, and aging ranchers, while exploring all the loneliness, blood, and dirt of the Western landscape.

The epigraph of Close Range is from a retired Wyoming rancher: "Reality's never been of much use out here." Most characters in these narratives veer between what is actually possible and what is dreamed, as many take on the complex "story-within-a-story" mode.

"The Half-Skinned Steer," which has been chosen for inclusion in John Updike's anthology The Best American Short Stories of the Century (Houghton Mifflin, 1999), is one of the highlights of this well-crafted collection. A retired rancher, Mero, in his eighties and with a mind full of flashbacks, makes his way across the country to the old family ranch for his brother Rollo's funeral. The ranch is now a tourist trap called "Down Under Wyoming," and the journey turns hellish because of winter storms and the old man's difficulty with driving. Here, Proulx sets up all the themes that dominate this volume: the struggle of hope against nature, mortality, and despair.

Some of the newer and less-heralded stories in this collection are even more impressive. "Job History" chronicles the economic woes of the West through the life of Leeland Lee, who moves from job to job and plan to plan with an unyielding hope that prosperity awaits over the next ridge: "Leeland quits truck driving. Lori [his wife] has saved a...