The element of the bizarre when violence descends on us is one of Proulx’s best subjects, marvellously embodied in the first of these stories, ‘Family Man’. Set in a Wyoming old-people’s home, it is principally about an old cowhand’s discovery of his father’s polygamous ways. For no very good reason, however, it includes the wild coincidence of a disreputable part of the hero’s past, an aged Forrie Wintka, turning up at the home (‘The first female he had ever plowed, a coal-town slut, was sharing final days with him at the Mellowhorn Home’). Most novelists would exploit or develop the mild novelistic sin of the coincidence; Proulx inconsequentially throws poor old Forrie into the Grand Canyon (‘There was a stifled ‘Oh!’ and she disappeared. A park ranger ran to the parapet.’) no more than two pages after she first enters.
If violence unbalances the form of some of these stories, so that an account of a marriage ends in a lengthy description of an injured woman thirsting to death on a trail, or (another story) bleeding to death in a remote cottage, or (another story) the husband dying after being kicked in the thigh by a horse, then Proulx’s theme, really, is how violence unbalances all our lives. It won’t become just another episode in our own narratives, and it makes these narratives topple over in ugly, affecting ways. And, quite often, she seems to see how the bizarre and inexplicable, the grotesque juxtaposition, can underlie our happinesses as well as our tragedies.
Marc was fourteen years older than Catlin, could speak three languages, was something of a self-declared epicure, rock climber, an expert skier, a not-bad cellist, a man more at home in Europe than the American west, he said but Catlin thought these differences were inconsequential although she had only been out of the state twice, spoke only American and played no instrument. They met and fell for each other in Idaho.
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