Poll

TBOAI is second story in a row, after The Bloody Chamber, with shrimp and avocado.

TOCS is a jumbly mess, fact after fact, name upon name, song titles, sketched backgrounds of person after person. No, thank you.

Oh, and so much of that is what I loved about Them Old Cowboy Songs, Ctb :-)

Underneath it all, Proulx has so much going on, and I think the style enriches it!

Trevor wrote: "Oh, and so much of that is what I loved about Them Old Cowboy Songs, Ctb :-)

Underneath it all, Proulx has so much going on, and I think the style enriches it!"

Absolutely!

I love Annie Proulx, and I love "Them Old Cowboy Songs." I want it to advance. No shade thrown at "The Beginning of an Idea," which is pretty darn near perfect itself.

Annie Proulx for me, too.

This was a bit ironic. I'd vote the Chekhov story over either of these. But Chekhov isn't here and so I decided to remove his contribution to McGahern story. That left little to compare.

A lot of votes here, but not much discussion. With "Them Old Cowboy Songs" I felt like a plot description would make it sound like it is a genre story. But the writing is very masterfully done to elevate even the most mundane moments to have a greater beauty. I thought of "Paul's Case" (which I did not vote for) while reading this and thought again how in that case the storytelling did not make the character rise to a level of something special. Had Proulx written it, I suspect I might have voted for it.

"The Beginning Of An Idea" had some nice parts to it, especially the section where she is dealing with her non-committal lover, but in the end it felt like more of a jumble of bits stuck together. I also never really understood why the particular pair of sentences that get repeated throughout were so compelling to her. Not bad, in the end, but not as good. "Them Old Cowboy Songs" got my vote.

Trevor wrote: "Oh, and so much of that is what I loved about Them Old Cowboy Songs, Ctb :-)

Underneath it all, Proulx has so much going on, and I think the style enriches it!"

Reading TOCS is like riding a bike downhill over a loose stone, rutted road. It makes my jaw and shoulders hurt, so I got off as soon as I got to a flat, dusty patch, but I've promised myself to closely and fully read every story that advances, especially the ones that I short shrifted. It didn't need my vote here, but your esteem for it has value.

I restarted and this time finished Cowboy. Once Proulx gets past her textbook beginning, a compendium of Proper Noun facts, she relaxes and develops the story. I don't mind that it has advanced.

But, still, that rutted, stony road beginning reminded me of Barkskins which also opens with a plethora of facts, proper nouns... but Cowboy is worse. Why can't that info be organically scrolled out from the story instead of listed like a chart?

First three paragraphs (discounting a single line of dialog):

Archie McLaverty, homesteader, sixteen, liar, smooth skinned, thin lips, red cheeks, curly, electrified, auburn hair, conceived in Ireland, born 1868, speaks with a brogue, orphaned at 7, orphaned again at 14, musically inclined, good memory for tunes and lyrics, learned dozens of songs before age 7, inherited $100

Mother McLaverty, died of cholera, taught Archie music
Father McLaverty, railroad spiker, died of an overdose of
Strychnine, medicine used against cholera and measles

Dakota Territory, Archie's birthplace

Bantry Bay, ancestral home of Archie's parents

Union Pacific Railroad, Mr McLaverty's employer

Rose McLaverty, homesteader, wife of Archie

Little Weed, creek or river, but definitely not named for an obnoxious weed

Sierra Madre, despite the multitude of facts, no mention of which range (see subtitle of the collection for that)

P.H. Weed, starved to death prospector

Bunk Peck, ranch owner, in his 20s, Archie's boss, resentful of Archie

Tom Ackler, sun-dried prospector, summer neighbor (yeah, note that covert adjective)

Mrs Sarah Peck, Missouri Methodist, widow, warmhearted, self-immolated

The fourth paragraph is chock-a-block with song titles and lyrics.

Then the Story begins in fifth paragraph only to be derailed in the sixth and seventh (twelve more proper nouns) with background facts about Rose, the Dorgans, and the station.

Did anyone else have to ruminate about what "plunging steeds" means? I mean, they're lonely frontier men, and plunging seemed like a verb.... Two disparate images. The proper one, quite lovely.

I think there is so much more going on, Ctb. To be sure, I'd hate it if all stories were written in this way, but it works so well here, that clinical attention to the basics. These are the calling-cards of the frontier, and I do think Proulx has a lot of poetry going on too.

For me, this is a great opening paragraph:

"Archie and Rose McLaverty staked out a homestead where the Little Weed comes rattling down from the Sierra Madre, water named not for miniature obnoxious flora but for P. H. Weed, a gold-seeker who had starved near its source. Archie had a face as smooth as a skinned aspen, his lips barely incised on the surface, as though scratched in with a knife. All his natural decoration was in his red cheeks and his springy waves of auburn hair, which seemed charged with voltage. He lied about his age to anyone who asked—he was not twenty-one but sixteen. The first summer, they lived in a tent while Archie worked on a small cabin. It took him a month of rounding up stray cows for Bunk Peck before he could afford two glass windows. The cabin was snug, built with eight-foot squared-off logs tenoned on the ends and dropped into mortised uprights, a size Archie could handle himself, with a little help from their only neighbor, Tom Ackler, a sun-dried prospector with a summer shack up on the mountain. They chinked the cabin with heavy yellow clay. One day, Archie dragged a huge flat stone to the house for a doorstep. It was pleasant to sit in the cool of the evening with their feet on the great stone and watch the deer come down to drink and, just before darkness, see the herons flying upstream, their color matching the sky so closely they might have been eyes of wind. Archie dug into the side of the hill and built a stout meat house, sawed wood while Rose split kindling until they had four cords stacked high against the cabin, almost to the eaves, the pile immediately tenanted by a weasel."

"Eyes of wind" -- beautiful! I love how this introduces the characters, the settling down, the passage of time, all so nicely.

I'll write more next round because I definitely want this one to beat "Foster."

Yeah, I reread that "eyes of wind" several times to imagine and enjoy it.

It seems Proulx is so eager for us to love these characters and this setting as much as she does that she overwhelms me with their details, like a new mom training a new babysitter.

But, again, it's only the style of those first 8 or 9 paragraphs I dislike. Once she finishes describing Harp Daft, I'm in for the ride.

As for a comparison to poetry, poetic styles are as diverse and varied as prose. People tend to use poetic or lyrical to describe whichever style of prose that engages them.