Light fantastic

Annie Proulx is a genuine character -- both a woman of character and a true original, a writer with a knack for evoking the special, often peculiar, qualities of life in that ever-shrinking portion of America known as the country. She has a wonderful ear for dialogue, a shrewd understanding of people, a strong feeling for landscape, a nuts-and-bolts knowledge of what it means to work the land and a wry sense of humor rather like Mark Twain’s: laconic, often deadpan, prone to hyperbole as well as understatement and irony.

Proulx’s sense of humor is much in evidence in “Bad Dirt,” which, like her superb 1999 collection, “Close Range,” is set in Wyoming (where bad dirt roads abound). Five long stories alternate with six short ones. The longer are more ambitious, more serious in tone, while the shorter are light, often whimsical, sometimes even fantastic. Indeed, in this collection, several tales are so airy and insubstantial as to be little more than extended jokes. Some involve elements of the supernatural. One features an Aladdin-like household utensil that makes wishes come true. In another, the Earth opens up to transport arrogant despoilers of the environment straight to hell. The shortest is a delightful conversation among three badgers, one of whom once taught creative writing (or maybe barge navigation) at the university in Bozeman but was denied tenure.

The six short pieces are set in Elk Tooth, where “everyone tries to be a character and with some success. There is little more to it than being broke, proud, ingenious and setting your heels against civilized society’s pull.... If you want a fancy dinner or batteries or tampons you drive forty-four miles until you hit Sack.... But Elk Tooth has its attractions -- the three bars -- the Silvertip, the Pee Wee, and Muddy’s Hole.... “

The longer stories, some spanning generations, portray a gallery of characters: ranchers, Native Americans, trailer park drifters and retired urbanites in search of a rural lifestyle. We meet folks unshakably attached to the land, whose spouses have left them or whose kids are off at film school in California. Occasionally, these powerful tales are weakened by bouts of jocularity at the wrong moments. One gets the feeling, however, that sometimes these odd flashes of levity arise not only out of Proulx’s innate exuberance but out of a desperate pessimism that underlies the lighter and darker stories alike.

Take rancher Gilbert Wolfscale: “He had always voted Republican and supported energy development as the best way to make jobs in the rural hinterland. But when the poison wastewater seeped ... into the groundwater, into Bull Jump Creek, into his irrigation ditches, even into his household well water, he saw it was killing the ranch.... [H]e wrote letters and went to meetings.... The meetings were strange, for ecological conservationists and crusty ranchers came together in the same room, in agreement for once.... When the gas company reps or politicians came, the meetings were rancorous and loud, and at the end people signed petitions with such force that their pens ripped the paper, but it all meant nothing.”

Under such grim circumstances, no wonder Proulx has dreamed up magic kitchenware and hellholes transporting despoilers straight to the netherworld -- or that the gaiety informing her latest collection is a desperate gaiety. *