[In the following review, Jacobs offers a generally positive assessment of Close Range.]

Annie Proulx is perhaps best known for her Pulitzer Prize—winning novel The Shipping News and for her luscious prose, which is also in evidence in Close Range in evocative descriptions like the following: “It was her voice that drew you in, that low, twangy voice, wouldn't matter if she was saying the alphabet, what you heard was the rustle of hay. She could make you smell the smoke from an unlit fire.”

These eleven stories are populated by images of unrequited longing, wide-open spaces, hardscrabble lives, and characters with unlikely names: Ottaline Touhey, Sutton Muddyman, Car Scrope, Sweets Musgrove, to cite just a few. Two of the pieces, “The Blood Bay” and “55 Miles to the Gas Pump,” are so short that they function more as anecdotes than stories, and the slightly longer “Job History” is just what the title indicates. In contrast to the often masterful longer stories, these pieces feel like filler.

The stories are uneven, but when they work, they are wondrous, with characters so alive and touching that the reader feels the ache of loss as the final page is turned. Most successful is the very last story in the volume, “Brokeback Mountain,” the tale of two rough-and-tumble cowboys, Ennis del Mar and Jack Twist, who first meet and work together as sheepherder and camp tender on Brokeback Mountain in 1963 when they are young. Over a long summer alone together, the two men gradually fall in love. Needless to say, love is not acknowledged as love, and the story follows these two men over the course of their years, as husbands and fathers who forge traditional lives. The story unfolds with a growing sense of Ennis's yearning for Twist, for the man whom he did love despite fate and ban and in a world where such a love cannot be recognized, often even by the people who are in love. In choosing such an unlikely setting for heartbreak and creating such strongly evocative settings and characters, Proulx proves her exquisite command of the story genre.

An almost equally notable work is “The Half-Skinned Steer,” chosen by John Updike for inclusion in Houghton Mifflin's Best American Stories of the Century. This story chronicles a trip back home, back west, and back in time by an octogenarian in his Cadillac. Proulx indulges herself at times with sentences like the following:

With the lapping subtlety of incoming tide the shape of the ranch began to gather in his mind; he could recall the intimate fences he'd made, taut wire and perfect corners, the draws and rock outcrops, the watercourse valley steepening, cliffs like bones with shreds of meat on them rising and rising, and the stream plunging suddenly underground, disappearing into subterranean darkness of blind fish, shooting out of the mountain ten miles west on a neighbor's place, but leaving their ranch some badland red country as dry as a cracker, steep canyons with high caves suited to lions.

Even for one who doesn't appreciate prose that calls attention to itself, these slightly purple flights suit Proulx's narrative.

Despite the unevenness of the stories, the volume makes a strong impression, seducing the reader into a modern romance, often verging on the Gothic, that is Proulx's vision of Wyoming.