Close range review

Anna Mundow,
New York Daily News, Close Range is not one long dirge simply played in eleven different keys. Each story presents a subtle change of mood and each character inhabits a particular world, a world that Proulx constructs with graceful, devastating sentences.
Anna Mundow believes that the book describes other world but it describe the west and hardship of life that come with living in a frontier state.

Dan Schneider
She, in effect, has written a book that a tourist might, as they drove through the state, and eavesdropped on the local bullshitters- getting all the surface details but lacking any true insight.In short, she would be far better off, literally, trying to emulate someone like Sherwood Anderson, whose almost-stereotypical characters at least had soul, and were capable of rising above their stations- however mediocre or degraded they might have been.

He has a very negative view of Annie Proulx as a person who knows nothing of the environment of her characters or of the land and its local culture.I believe that just by her having years of experience of American life and the research she must have had to do to write this book would mean that she was not lacking insight at all.