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ENLARGE
SOUNDINGS
Kirk Robertson
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ENLARGE
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ENLARGE
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Annie Proulx is the author of eight books, the winner of a Pulitzer Prize, a National book Award and a Pen Faulkner Award. She’s published two previous collections of “Wyoming Stories,” and her latest, “Fine Just the Way It Is” (Simon and Schuster), bears that same subtitle.
All nine of the stories in the collection are set in Wyoming — from the nineteenth century to the present. All of them evoke the harsh realities of life in the region.
Back then a would-be cowboy walks the perimeter of his eighty acre spread singing them old buckaroo songs, ending up hoarse, thinking maybe, just maybe things might be okay. And very recently, a young woman — daughter of a “trash rancher” — just back from “Eye-Rack,” muses on the roll call of grief that life on this land has caused.
Elsewhere, Satan, also a resident of Wyoming, appears in two weirdly surreal tales — in one hard at work on remodeling the levels of hell, in the other devising schemes to mess with your email.
Her prose is taut, crystalline, the tone pitch-perfect, deadly humorous with an acutely-tuned sense of the absurd. The stories, and the characters that inhabit them, ring absolutely true, springing from the complications of real life yet, at the same time, sending metaphorical peals across an unforgiving, and unrelenting, landscape.
Collectively, they are ferocious evocations of fate, inexorably moving toward you, like an oncoming storm.
All nine of the stories in the collection are set in Wyoming — from the nineteenth century to the present. All of them evoke the harsh realities of life in the region.
Back then a would-be cowboy walks the perimeter of his eighty acre spread singing them old buckaroo songs, ending up hoarse, thinking maybe, just maybe things might be okay. And very recently, a young woman — daughter of a “trash rancher” — just back from “Eye-Rack,” muses on the roll call of grief that life on this land has caused.
Elsewhere, Satan, also a resident of Wyoming, appears in two weirdly surreal tales — in one hard at work on remodeling the levels of hell, in the other devising schemes to mess with your email.
Her prose is taut, crystalline, the tone pitch-perfect, deadly humorous with an acutely-tuned sense of the absurd. The stories, and the characters that inhabit them, ring absolutely true, springing from the complications of real life yet, at the same time, sending metaphorical peals across an unforgiving, and unrelenting, landscape.
Collectively, they are ferocious evocations of fate, inexorably moving toward you, like an oncoming storm.
Then there’s “Lives of the Artists” (Henry Holt) by Calvin Tomkins.
While on the one hand, the allusion to Vasari’s 1550 volume on the lives of the most eminent artists — as a chronicle of attempts at progress toward perfection of representation — may be a bit much; but it may also be an accurate reflection of our times, and our current attitudes, or lack thereof toward artists.
He chronicles the exploits of ten contemporary artists: Damien Hirst, Cindy Sherman, Julian Schnabel, Richard Serra, James Turrell, Matthew Barney, Maurizio Cattelan, Jasper Johns, Jeff Koons and John Currin.
And while it may be possible — it’s always possible with such lists — to quibble over who they are; because, as Tomkins notes, making art is both harder and easier than it used to be, partly due to the fact there is so much of it: more than 10,000 artists in New York City alone.
The pieces were all published in the “New Yorker” between 1999 and 2008 and they are, in reality a series of character sketches illustrating both Tomkin’s assertion that the life of an artist is somehow referenced in the work as well as the idea that art is many things to many people.
The result is a series of profiles, a survey of some of the ripples in our current anything goes art world, not history, but articles characterized by an informed anecdotalism.
While on the one hand, the allusion to Vasari’s 1550 volume on the lives of the most eminent artists — as a chronicle of attempts at progress toward perfection of representation — may be a bit much; but it may also be an accurate reflection of our times, and our current attitudes, or lack thereof toward artists.
He chronicles the exploits of ten contemporary artists: Damien Hirst, Cindy Sherman, Julian Schnabel, Richard Serra, James Turrell, Matthew Barney, Maurizio Cattelan, Jasper Johns, Jeff Koons and John Currin.
And while it may be possible — it’s always possible with such lists — to quibble over who they are; because, as Tomkins notes, making art is both harder and easier than it used to be, partly due to the fact there is so much of it: more than 10,000 artists in New York City alone.
The pieces were all published in the “New Yorker” between 1999 and 2008 and they are, in reality a series of character sketches illustrating both Tomkin’s assertion that the life of an artist is somehow referenced in the work as well as the idea that art is many things to many people.
The result is a series of profiles, a survey of some of the ripples in our current anything goes art world, not history, but articles characterized by an informed anecdotalism.
