Hurrah for Ms. Annie!
Funny how I had to go to Hong Kong to discover the work of E. Annie Proulx. Reading her work is like receiving gifts, every page is a testament to honest-to-goodness brilliant writing, unpretentious, unalloyed and real.
So far I’ve read two of her novels, The Shipping News, and Postcards; and two of her collections, Heartsongs, and Close Range: Wyoming Stories which included Brokeback Mountain.I bought all of her books from Flow, my favorite (second-hand) book store.
I didn’t even to watch Brokeback (the hype was too much. I 
wanted to read the story first), and now that I’ve read the short story it was based on, I guess I can see it and make a fair assessment about the film (my husband liked it. We actually spent 15 minutes discussing it over the phone).
Anyways, back to singing praises to Ms. Proulx’ work.
Her characters are ordinary, working class people. Miners and potato farmers; drifters, migrant workers, small store owners in Middle Western America. She traces the history of these ordinary people with respect and she depicts them and their problems, struggles and occasional small triumphs with honesty. There is harshness and purity in her description, and between narratives of physical context (she can describe a turbulent sea as if she was the first to ever see such a body of water in torment; or the dryness of the desert and the landscape of mountains and forests like she created them all) she slips in the monumental tragedies that befall the common man and his family like a sudden knife to the gut.
She pays tribute to the ordinary, and reveals that underneath ordinariness, with compassion and faithful attention to detail and nuances of expression and dialect, there is so much more to each and every person. She doesn’t romanticize anything, is often blunt and to the point especially when it comes to stating social realities of poverty, hunger, discrimination. The way she delves into the horrors of the human heart and its conflicts with the truths upheld by the cruel world and its homophobic, racist, sexist and elitist biases is also very surgical. She cuts with her words, and to bleed is to be redeemed.
Imagine if she were political! Aaaaaargh! The way she decribes the plight of Mexican migrant workers, or mine workers, or the small cattle farmers before the coming of the big meat monopolies and their barbed-wire fences is so moving in a way that refuses to be saccharine or blatantly sympathetic.
She is, at this point, my favorite author.
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The following is wikepedia’s entry on Proulx:
Edna Annie Proulx (pronounced /pru/) (born August 22, 1935) is an American (with Quebec origins) journalist and author. Her second novel, The Shipping News (1993), won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award for fiction in 1994. Her short story "Brokeback Mountain" was adapted as an Academy Award, BAFTA and Golden Globe Award-winning major motion picture released in 2005. Brokeback Mountain received massive critical acclaim and went on to be nominated for a leading 8 Academy Awards, taking home 3 of them. She won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for her first novel, Postcards. She has written most of her stories and books simply as Annie Proulx, but has also carried the name E. Annie Proulx.
Personal Life and Writing
She was born in Norwich, Connecticut and graduated from Deering High School in Portland, Maine. She then attended Colby College "for a short period in the 1950s." She later returned to school, studying at the University of Vermont from 1966 to 1969, and graduated cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa with a Bachelor of Arts in History in 1969. She got her Master of Arts from Sir George Williams University in Montreal, Quebec in 1973 and pursued, but did not complete, her Ph.D. Starting as a journalist, she did not begin writing fiction until she was in her fifties. Subsequently, she held NEA and Guggenheim fellowships.
A few years after receiving much attention for The Shipping News, she had the following comment on her celebrity status: "It’s not good for one’s view of human nature, that’s for sure. You begin to see, when invitations are coming from festivals and colleges to come read (for an hour for a hefty sum of money), that the institutions are head-hunting for trophy writers. Most don’t particularly care about your writing or what you’re trying to say. You’re there as a human object, one that has won a prize. It gives you a very odd, meat-rack kind of sensation." [1]
In 1997, Proulx was awarded the Dos Passos Prize. Proulx has twice won the O. Henry Prize for the year’s best short story. In 1998, she won for "Brokeback Mountain," which had appeared in The New Yorker on October 13, 1997. (The story has since become an award-winning 2005 movie, directed by Ang Lee.) Proulx won again the following year for "The Mud Below," which appeared in The New Yorker June 22 and 29, 1999. Both appear in her 1999 collection of short stories, Close Range: Wyoming Stories. The lead story in this collection, entitled "The Half-Skinned Steer," was selected by novelist John Updike for inclusion in "The Best American Short Stories of the Century" published in 1999.
Proulx’s most famous critic is BR Myers, who attacked the writer extensively in his A Reader’s Manifesto. Myers claimed that Proulx is purposely incoherent and allusive. He sees her as part of a problematic trend in American literature in which writers are praised simply because their prose is so difficult to understand. Countercritics, for instance, The Complete Review have complained that Myers has unfairly assumed that Proulx has a canonical status which she in fact does not enjoy.
Proulx lived for more than 30 years in Vermont, was married three times, and has three sons and a daughter (named Jon, Gillis, Morgan and Muffy). At age 70, she moved to Arvada, Wyoming, where she writes novels.
Criticism of Academy Awards
After the film adaptation of Brokeback Mountain lost the best picture Oscar to Crash at the 2006 Academy Awards, Proulx published a screed in the British newspaper The Guardian in which she lambasted the awards show. Among other complaints, Proulx pondered whether Philip Seymour Hoffman’s portrayal of writer Truman Capote, though "brilliant," was in fact little more than "mimicry." She wrote that the Academy members were a "dim LA crowd" and exhibited "insufferable self-importance" when they did not select the film based on her short story as Best Picture. Proulx also referred to Crash as "Trash" and likened the evening to "a small-town talent-show night." She suggested that the awards attempted to be safely "controversial," but were by implication homophobic for not honoring Brokeback Mountain, which had won most major awards (including the Golden Globe for best drama) in the lead-up to the Oscars. She also suggested that Scientology influenced the decision.
Twice in her piece, Proulx referred to the Academy voters and show audience as "heffalumps," an insult that left some readers puzzled. Because the elephant is the mascot of the Republican Party, she may have been suggesting that Academy voters evinced right-wing bias when deciding which motion picture should win Best Picture. Given that Oscar host Jon Stewart joked that one could not see so many glittering stars in one place without making a donation to the Democratic Party, that presumably would come as a surprise to the Academy and its membership. More likely, she was drawing a social/cultural parallel between the Academy and the slow, reticent and cowardly creature from A.A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh stories.
She also called the performance of the Oscar-winning song "It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp" a "violent" and "atrocious act."
