Fine Just the Way It Is: Wyoming Stories 3 was published by Charles Scribner’s Sons in 2008 as the final volume of Proulx’s Wyoming trilogy. The collection is the darkest and most formally experimental of the three: where Close Range established the territory and Bad Dirt documented its changes, Fine Just the Way It Is pushes toward allegory and myth.
The opening story, “Family Man,” follows a 96-year-old rancher through his memories and his present loneliness with a compression that borders on poetry. “I’ve Always Loved This Place” is set in Hell — a bureaucratic, overcrowded Hell staffed by functionaries who process the damned with the bored efficiency of a motor vehicle office — and two of its demons discuss the special category of Wyoming souls, who are too stubborn and independent to be properly processed. “Tits-Up in a Ditch” follows a young woman soldier returning from Iraq to a Wyoming that has no idea what to do with her.
The historical stories are among the collection’s strongest: “Them Old Cowboy Songs” traces a young homesteading couple in the 1880s whose youthful optimism is systematically destroyed by the landscape and the economy, and “Deep-Blood-Greasy-Bowl” follows a 19th-century cattle drive with an attention to physical labor and animal behavior that is almost documentary. Proulx’s Wyoming, by this third collection, has become a landscape with geological depth: the present is layered over a past of violence, extinction, and geological transformation, and the stories move between these layers with the freedom of myth.
Collecting Fine Just the Way It Is
First edition (Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 2008): Hardcover with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $15–$30
- Very good: $8–$15