Fine Just The Way It Is

Author: Annie Proulx
Publishers: HarperCollins,
Year: 2009, pp 221,
Price: Rs 325

Of all the clouds and dusts 'Fine Just The Way It Is' remains a compelling take on how fate decides human lives.

What happens when the author’s name becomes bigger than the book title itself? Well, great expectations plus some disappointments are the usual answers. For Pulitzer Prize winner Annie Proulx (of The Brokeback Mountain fame) this is her third edition of the Wyoming Stories — a compilation of nine short stories featuring life in America’s West.

Annie stretches her symbolic boundaries covering generations of Americans and their struggle by infusing endless and painful memories, yet there appears to be some gap in some of the stories involving the never-ending search for peaceful-reunion with the self.

The book begins with the ‘Family Man’, the reminiscences of an old rancher in a nursing home, and climaxes it with the remarkable ‘Tits-Up in a Ditch’, a kind of an autobiography of a character Dakotah Lister. Lister is a bitter single mother who returns to her grandparents’ farm after losing an arm while serving in Iraq. Sandwiched between the opening and the closing stories are, traumatic experiences and some black humour involving poor cowboys, damned hikers, and awfully lonely women. The first and the last stories are perhaps the most painful of all. The ‘Family Man’ invokes the reader’s sympathy and support for the old man who tries to reveal his family’s bitter secret to his granddaughter. ‘Tits-Up in a Ditch’ prods the softest corner of the heart and it hurts.

Narration remains Annie’s forte. One could clearly picturise the vastness, the void and emptiness in the lives of her characters. ‘I’ve Always Loved This Place’, ‘Them Old Cowboy Songs’and ‘The Sagebrush Kid’ (not exactly about a boy) makes a lighter read with a bit of dark comedy here and there. However, ‘The Great Divide’, takes a new turn when a couple, Hi and Helen, looking for a suitable home faces obstacles the ‘American way’.
Annie also provides a wide-ranging mixture of metaphor in symbols associated with Old American West which may be interesting for cowboy genre fans. But for an ordinary reader, there are many phrases and expressions that need simplification.

All the stories are generally sad and depressing. The characters try to run away from extreme poverty but fate always had something else for them. We feel sorry for them but at the same time Annie seems to stretch way beyond imaginable limits. Her bold language and complexity in revealing the plots are also a turn off.

The overall theme of the book is admirable for its detailed observation and sense of humour but stretching the reader’s mind too far way from the event to other elements like the weather and so forth, is somewhat distracting.

Of all the clouds and dusts Fine Just The Way It Is remains a compelling take on how fate decides human lives.