Like its acclaimed predecessors, Close Range (1999) and Bad Dirt (2004), Annie Proulx's latest collection of short stories from Wyoming is full of people with outlandish names: Duck Slaver, Fenk and Verla Fipps, Chay Sump, Sink Gartrell, Bunk Peck, Harp Daft. Many of these characters - cowboys, ranch-hands, their wives and widows and other inhabitants of the state's windswept prairies and closed-in little communities - meet fates that are outlandish, too: felled by a bullet ricocheting from an ancient Indian rock carving, incinerated by a grass fire accidentally ignited while singeing slaughtered chickens, poisoned by an overdose of strychnine-laced patent medicine, pierced through the brain by the beak of a heron defending its eggs.

These are just the most bizarre casualties of a region Proulx depicts as harshly hostile to human fulfilment. Conjuring up Wyoming's landscapes in all their stark grandeur - jagged mountains rearing from deserts scattered with sagebrush, flat-topped hills whose eroded cliffs display “layered bands of buff, gamboge and violet” - she insistently foregrounds the discrepancy between this scenic magnificence and the often unlovely lives led amongst it. Vast empty plains dwarf people's strivings. Wide spaces coexist with narrow-mindedness and crippling lack of scope.

As the novel unrolls, its title, Fine Just the Way It Is (from a rallying cry of Wyoming reactionaries), seems more and more savagely ironic. In the new west of today the wild- erness may look tamed. Highways stretch across the one-time badlands. Amenities such as the Mellowhorn Retirement Home, with its buckskin-fringed lampshades and “rustic bar” made of old ranch fences, are now in evidence. Rodeo buckles, once the trophies of dirt-poor men risking life and limb for winnings, have become bingo prizes. But, Proulx keeps reminding you, beneath this ersatz top-dressing, Wyoming's elemental toughness persists. In one story, a young woman proud of her up-to-date environmental concerns comes horribly to grief while hiking on a solitary mountain trail.

Recoil from the garish vulgarities of modern-day Wyoming never pushes Proulx into sentimentality about its past. Old-timers in her stories may sometimes pine for vanished pleasures such as the near-noiselessness of the prairies in their youth - just “the natural sound of the wind, hoofbeats, the snap of the old house logs splitting in winter cold, wild herons crying their way downriver”. But they never delude themselves about the risks and rigours that were ever-present, too. “People thought they was doing all right if they was alive,” one veteran remarks of Wyoming in the early 20th century. An account of two settlers struggling through the 1920s into the calamity of the Depression unsparingly bears this out. Even grimmer is Proulx's portrayal of a newly married couple battling to survive on a remote homestead more than a century ago: a world of such bare-subsistence wretchedness that, after enduring an agonising still-birth, the wife sees a sheet spoilt by bleeding as part of the tragedy, too.

Over-enthusiastic heaping of background research into her fiction distorts some of Proulx's longer works. The author of that taut masterpiece, Brokeback Mountain, has produced some disappointingly broken-backed novels. In the short story, a form that demands selectivity and spareness, she comes into her own. There are a few duds in this volume: two whimsical satiric squibs about the Devil gloating over humanity's degrading of the Earth into “Hell Plus”, a fantasia about a man-eating sagebrush shrub. But most of the stories finely exhibit her distinctive skills: from cameos of the natural world that are crisp with imaginatively turned precision (“a solitary magpie flying across the quilted sky like a driven needle, the occasional rattlesnake ribboning away”) to vividly believable characters caught in gripping dramas of ordeal and endurance.

The closing story, which recounts in low-key prose punctuated by laconic exchanges of speech what happens to an unloved illegitimate girl faced with gruelling setbacks, is particularly outstanding. Like Brokeback Mountain, it scrutinises and salutes the near-mute stoicism of people trapped in implacably adverse circumstances. And on this subject Proulx is incomparable.

Fine Just the Way It Is by Annie Proulx
Fourth Estate £14.99 pp221

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