Annie Proulx has published a new book of stories entitled Bad Dirt. A sequel to the haunting Wyoming stories of Close Range, the volume asks to be compared it to its predecessor. Terrence Rafferty does so, and reads into Proulx's latest an exhaustion with what was once for her phenomenally fertile subject matter:

Even in the serious stories, there are indications that she doesn't feel the same respect for her characters that she used to and has become impatient with the stubborn futility of their existence.

Throughout ''Bad Dirt,'' the style is far more casual than the intense, fiercely concentrated prose of ''Close Range,'' which managed somehow to be both terse and baroque. The best stories in that book were like compressed novels. Dense with observed detail, they strained heroically against the limits of the short form. This time, Proulx may simply be trying to write in a plainer, more reader-friendly way, but her newly straightforward prose feels like a slackening, a weakening of the strong will required to keep looking at this vast landscape and find more in it than a great emptiness.

The roadrunner briskness of ''Bad Dirt'' hints at a just-passing-through mentality. Two pretty good stories in this collection, ''The Indian Wars Refought'' and ''The Wamsutter Wolf,'' self-immolate in their very last lines, sentences that reduce everything that precedes them to the status of small, dry jokes. This is what happens, perhaps, when an imagination as ferocious as Annie Proulx's starts to feel that the land it's been living on can't sustain it anymore: she puts a torch to the place and rides like hell in the opposite direction.

It's probably no accident that the best story in ''Bad Dirt'' -- ''What Kind of Furniture Would Jesus Pick?'' -- is about a man who can't make a go of his ranch. Gilbert Wolfscale keeps at it, doggedly and half-hopelessly, fighting the ''downward ranching spiral of too much work, not enough money, drought,'' and ends up out on the open road, driving for the sake of driving and not caring where he's headed.

Proulx is one of our greatest writers of place; she has also shown, during the course of her career, a periodic need to shift her creative focus from one place to another--she's moved from rural New England (Postcards) to Newfoundland (The Shipping News) to Wyoming to the Texas panhandle (That Old Ace in the Hole); Accordian Crimes roves quite deliberately across the country, in a peripatetic regionalism that doesn't make for great fiction but does speak loudly to the nature of Proulx's literary sensibility.

I'm intrigued by Rafferty's review, not just because I adore Proulx, but because I share his sometimes presumptuous, always elemental interest in understanding how literary works express, or fail to express, writers' evolving creative temperaments. It won't matter to me if Bad Dirt is a "failure"--to me it will simply be another chapter in an evolving, intensely vital career. I'll be reading Bad Dirt just as soon as I've despatched Charlotte Simmons.

Meanwhile, I'd love to hear readers' thoughts on Proulx, American regionalism, and, more generally, the problems and possibilities of writerly exhaustion.

"In [reviewing] a book of essays of mine [a] critic said that one essay was written without conviction, was task-work, or that my heart was not in it, or something like that. Now this in itself was plumb wrong. Of all the pieces in the book it was the one I most cared about and wrote with most ardour. Where the critic was right was in thinking it the worst. Everyone agrees with him about that. I agree with him. But you see that neither the public nor I learns anything about that badness from his criticism. . . . Notice here . . . the total disregard of writing as a skill, the assumption that the writer's psychological state always flows unimpeded and undisguised into the product."

--C. S. Lewis, "On Criticism"

Well, I hated The Shipping News, and it was largely a matter of her creation and handling of the characters. I didn't care about any of the characters in the novel. A nuclear holocaust could have come and wiped them all away, and I would have been happy because presumably, that would have ended the novel.

I forced my way through it, because a colleague had so convincingly sung its praises, but I just didn't like it at all.

I haven't read anything else she's written, because of my experience reading The Shipping News, so perhaps I'd like the other stuff. However, with so much to read and so little time to read it in, I'm unlikely to ever make time to Proulx again. If I'm going to tackle a Prou-author, it'll be Proust.

This review brings to mind my reaction to the recent work of one of my once-favorite authors, Louise Erdrich. From Love Medicine to Tracks, I thought she was the best writer in American fiction. Her prose was intense, spare, and astonishingly precise. It was also transcendently tough and beautiful. In recent years, it seems to me that those qualities have eroded. She continues to explore the characters and settings that worked so well in her early work, but--to me at least--she seems not to work as hard at getting every word right as she used to. This came home to me, in particular, when I read The Last Report on the Miracles at Little Horse, which lacked neither drama nor good characters, but which struck me as downright sloppy in its execution. Superficially, it looked like an Erdrich novel, but the singular power of her perfectly crafted prose was absent. I have no idea if this book's failings should be correlated with difficulties in her personal life, or boredom with her subjects; nor do I know if they have continued in her more recent work. I finished Last Report, but in finishing it my passion for Erdrich's fictional world died, and I haven't returned to it since.