The Lost Frontier: Reading Annie Proulx’s Wyoming Stories by Mark Asquith (review)

The Lost Frontier provides a meticulously researched consideration of Annie Proulx’s three Wyoming- based volumes of short stories: Close Range: Wyoming Stories (1999), Bad Dirt: Wyoming Stories (2004), and Fine Just the Way It Is: Wyoming Stories (2008). Mark Asquith contextualizes his finely tuned close analyses with a succinct history of how mythologies and fabrications of the West emerged in the late nineteenth century. He sets Proulx’s work in a tradition of literature and film that interrogates the desire for an authentic West that has always been a construction. Asquith portrays Proulx’s many damaged, struggling characters as navigating diverse paths in relation to the powerful constructs of the West to suggest that the myths of the West themselves are, in part, responsible for the damage.

The book’s informative introduction discusses the development of the concept of the West and its central place in the nation’s sense of itself, drawing on contributions by key figures such as Bill Cody, Frederick Jackson Turner, and Theodore Roosevelt. Asquith establishes these roots as constructions and traces the roles that film and literary history have played in perpetuating them. Subsequent chapters handle the essential ingredients of the West: “Landscape,” “Pioneers,” “Ranchers,” “Cowboys,” “Indians,” and more contentiously, “Losers.” Each chapter sets the historical, filmic, and literary contexts before progressing to consider Proulx’s handling of the topic through analysis of three or four stories in detail, supported by analysis of some of Proulx’s other fiction (That Old Ace in the Hole [2002], Postcards [1992], and Accordion Crimes [1996]). In “Landscape,” “The Half-Skinned Steer,” the trilogy’s opening story, is among the stories analyzed to argue that Proulx offers “a new notion of landscape, which deliberately foregrounds its position as cultural product” (56). The ensuing chapters offer nuanced readings of the figures that grow out of this landscape and illuminate Proulx’s exploration of myths and history and the blurring between the two.

A significant strength of The Lost Frontier is Asquith’s alertness to the complexities of gender, with informed readings of masculinity, femininity, and sexuality running throughout the book as a whole. The “Indians” chapter offers a critique of Proulx’s deployment of minor Native American characters as symbolic “transients whose role is to question cultural expectations” (156). Yet in the story “The Indian Wars Refought,” a more complex picture of contemporary Native American experiences is foregrounded as the story focuses on the strains between the commodification of Indian heritage and a more factual realism. Attention to nondominant figures is maintained in “Losers,” where characters who are “the casualties of economic change” hold the focus (182). The book concludes with a reading of “The Family Man,” “a story about telling stories, particularly the stories we tell about the West” (186). It is an appropriate end to a stimulating book that interrogates the role not only of Proulx’s work but of literature and cultural products more widely in creating and critiquing constructions of the West.