Annie Proulx's latest volume of Wyoming stories, Bad Dirt, has received mixed reviews. Some say Bad Dirt is vintage Proulx; some say Proulx is palpably bored with her subject matter and that this makes for flat, uninspired stories. I'm about half way through Bad Dirt myself, and can see where both arguments come from. The initial story, "The Hellhole," is indeed tired and uninspired. A patchwork of pat descriptions and compact, incurious characterizations, it reads more like an outline of a story Proulx never managed to finish than like a fully evolved story with all the complexity and quirkiness that one associates with both Proulx's prose style and her manner of developing character and plot. An example of what I am talking about occurs when Proulx explains why the game warden who is the protagonist of the story dislikes poachers so much:

The minister did not know it, but of the fifty-three game wardens in Wyoming he had connected with the one who most hated moose cow killers who left orphan calves to figure things out for themselves in a world of predators and severe weather. For Creel Zmundzinski was an orphan himself who, after his parents were gone, lived with his aunt and uncle on their ranch in Encampment. But truancy, bad friends, and eventually, breaking and entering got him into the St. Francis Boys' Home. Smoldering with anger at the injustice of life and full of self-pity, he continued to cause trouble whenever a chance came. He might have graduated from St. Francis to the state pen in Rawlins but for Orion Horncrackle, an aging Game & Fish Warden.

But Bad Dirt is not all bad, and Proulx has moments of vintage excellence. A necessarily extended example from the story, "What Kind of Furniture Would Jesus Pick?":

In 1999 Gilbert Wolfscale's mother opened an official-looking letter from the California State Allocation Department. She read that she had inherited a sum of money from someone in that state. All she had to do was fill out the enclosed form, mail it back, and in six or eight weeks she would receive the inheritance. She spent two hours filling out the form with its demands for address, social security number, date of birth, bank account numbers, and other tedious details. She sat so long at the table with this form that her left leg went to sleep, and when she got up to go to the kitchen and make a cup of tea it buckled. She fell and broke her hip.

She recuperated very slowly. Even after the break had healed Gilbert had to drive her in weekly to Sheridan for therapy. He sometimes wondered why she didn't get one of her friends to drive her in. She was always on the phone gabbing with her cronies, and most of them still drove. He heard her talking with them about football, which she avidly watched on television.

"I'm for them Bears. I couldn't never be for them Packers."

When he asked her why she did not arrange a trip into town with Luce or Florence or Helen she said, "They're not family. Suppose the doctor was to give me bad news. I'd want a be with blood kin, not some other person."

While she met with the therapist Gilbert walked around the windy town streets rather than sit in a plastic chair in the stuffy waiting room. In a music store he looked at CDs, wondering at the proliferation of bands with trendy, foolish names. Behind a stiff plastic divider labeled "Miscellaneous" he found birdcalls, tap dancing, the whistles of steam locomotives from around the world. The last CD was Remembering Vietnam. The cover showed a grimy infantryman staring up at a helicopter. The back copy listed "Firefight," "Shrapnel," "AFVN," "Jungle Patrol," "Rain," "APC Convoy." He bought it.

In the truck driving home his mother said, "I don't have to go back there but a few more times, looks like, and thanks to heaven. Some a the strangest people settin in that waitin room. These two women got talkin about their Bible classes. Sounded pretty modern, you know, tryin a link the Bible to nowadays. But this Bible class they went to was tryin a guess how it would be if Jesus showed up in Sheridan. That got them all excited and there they set, what would he do for work. They both said he could easy find a job workin construction. Would he have his own house and would it be like a trailer or a regular house or a apartment? Then they got at the furniture, what kind a furniture would Jesus pick for his place. And you know how you get thinkin about things you overhear? Wasn't none a my business but there I set, crazy as they was, wonderin' if he'd pick out a maple rockin chair or a sofa with that Scotchguard fabric or what."

A month before his mother's fall she had bought some brightly colored kitchen sponges. One of them was purple, and she had developed an affection for it, never using it on greasy pots or to wipe up nasty spills. He dribbled coffee on the counter one morning and began to mop at the spill with the distinguished sponge.

"What are you doin! Don't use that--take the pink one. You dunderhead, I'm savin that one."

"For what, Ma?"

"For the good glasses." She meant the crystal wineglasses with the gold rims that had been passed down from Granny Webb and had stood inverted in the china cupboard for as long as he could remember. He had never known them to be used. Inside the china cupboard next to the glasses was a photograph of his father's mother in a black silk twill dress, looking freeze-dried and mournful.

"Where is that stupid mailman?" his mother said, pulling back the curtain and looking for the plume of dust along the road.

I'm not the person to answer this, since I have a complete failure of sensibility when it comes to Proulx. I have rarely read a book I disliked so much as "The Shipping News"--I know that countless readers found it incredibly moving and artfully crafted, but my experience of the prose was that it was flat and often quite clumsy and I didn't like the sentimental streak (or the cutesiness of the gimmick with the knots). I would rather read a fast-paced and bleak and depressing noir novel about identity fraud being practiced on old ladies (is that what the forms she's filling out really are)!