The Geographical Imagination of Annie Proulx: Rethinking Regionalism (review)

By any measure, Annie Proulx is an exceptional writer. She has achieved popular and critical acclaim, winning a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize (for 1993’s The Shipping News), among other honors, and becoming a household name when Ang Lee’s film based on her story “Brokeback Mountain” (from her 1999 story collection Close Range: Wyoming Stories) was nominated for an Academy Award. She has also established a reputation as a first-class regionalist, writing books in which the setting often upstages the characters, and, unusually for a writer whose work is linked so closely to place, she has specialized in multiple regions. Most now think of the Wyoming-based Proulx as a western writer, but she started out writing about the East Coast, where she grew up.

The Geographical Imagination of Annie Proulx: Rethinking Regionalism, edited by Alex Hunt, analyzes Proulx from many angles: as a writer who typically foregrounds place instead of characters (what Hunt calls “the insistence of geography” in her work), who delves into New England and the West, who works in the tradition of realism yet extends beyond it, venturing into territory that Margaret E. Johnson describes as “hyperreal,” and whose depiction of homosexual characters “challenges normative ideas of sexuality,” according to Christopher Pullen (1, 25, 155).

Hunt divides the book into three main sections: “Orientations,” about Proulx’s influences and her general themes; “Geographies,” about the different specific regions she has featured in her work; and “Directions,” which includes diverse ways of analyzing her work, from Pullen’s take on the “denial of domesticity” that occurs in “Brokeback Mountain” to Wes Berry’s views on the critique of capitalism inherent in some of her work (Pullen155). Many of the essayists remark on how little sympathy the author seems to have for some of the characters she depicts. But Proulx would probably argue that it’s the land, not she, that is without sympathy for its inhabitants. Perhaps O. Alan Weltzien puts it best when he discusses the story “The Wamsutter Wolf,” in which the protagonist travels on byways instead of paved roads: “This protagonist’s preference, which leads him to one of Proulx’s most merciless depictions of local white trash, signifies in miniature the landscape’s primacy and subsequent attenuation of human choices” (155).

The “attenuation of human choices” could be one of Proulx’s primary themes; this is particularly true in several of the strongest stories in her Fine Just the Way It Is: Wyoming Stories 3, published too recently to have been discussed in Hunt’s book. In “Tits-up in a Ditch,” a young Wyoming woman finds her choices limited by having a baby; she ends up enlisting in the army and serving in Iraq to support the child, which leads to disaster. In “Them Old Cowboy Songs,” set in 1885, a rancher must leave his pregnant wife for work. Their cabin’s isolation leads to the woman’s demise in childbirth. Repeatedly in Proulx’s writing, the harsh realities of landscape cause the people in it to make poor choices.

As the subtitle of this book suggests, Annie Proulx presents the reader with a chance to rethink regionalism. In Proulx’s depth of engagement with the regions she writes about, she redeems that term from its pejorative aspects and makes it a label to which any writer can aspire.