Close Range: Wyoming Stories by Annie Proulx
Published 2000 · 289 pages · 79,475 words · about 5 hours at an average pace · Short Fiction, Literary Fiction
How hard is Close Range: Wyoming Stories to read?
Close Range: Wyoming Stories scores 50 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 55 out of 100
- Proulx mixes ranching, weather and regional slang with unusual, exact nouns and verbs. The result is richer than The Road's sparse diction but far more accessible than Gravity's Rainbow.
- Sentence structure: 48 out of 100
- Her sentences are clipped, fragmentary and abrupt, with occasional long catalogues of landscape. They are demanding in rhythm but not deeply nested, close to Pedro Paramo in spareness.
- Abstraction: 40 out of 100
- The stories stay in concrete work, weather, bodies and bad luck. Ideas about fate and desire emerge from events rather than argument, similar to The Road.
- Information density: 52 out of 100
- Each story packs decades of life into a few pages with dense detail on ranch economics and place. It reads compressed like The Great Gatsby but across eleven separate worlds.
- Narrative indirection: 58 out of 100
- Proulx leaves emotions unspoken: Ennis and Jack's love is conveyed through gestures and gaps. Readers must infer what characters cannot say, more than in To Kill a Mockingbird.
- Symbolic density: 50 out of 100
- Objects like the shirts in 'Brokeback Mountain' and the steer in 'The Half-Skinned Steer' carry heavy meaning, and landscape acts as fate. It is restrained compared with The Great Gatsby.
- Ironic distance: 52 out of 100
- Proulx's dry humor, absurd place names and fatalistic narration create a wry gap between tone and tragedy. It is gentler than Catch-22 but sharper than Beloved.
- Resolution withholding: 55 out of 100
- Many stories end abruptly on a harsh image or a death, leaving moral meaning open. Plots close, but their significance lingers, as in The Great Gatsby.
- Structural complexity: 35 out of 100
- Eleven self-contained stories connected by place, with some jumping across decades in a single tale. It is simple compared with Flights, closer to a linear collection.
How Close Range: Wyoming Stories is regarded
Close Range: Wyoming Stories holds a literary regard score of 69 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.