Book Review: Who needs hell when you have Wyoming?

And there’s not much escape. The last story here is also the best, not least for its title, which might describe the collection as a whole: Tits-up in a Ditch. Dakotah believes she can get away from the life she’s been given by joining up, going to Iraq; she finds love there for a while with fellow female recruit, Marnie — a self-conscious counterpoint to Brokeback Mountain. But she has to come back of course, and home is every bit as much a war zone as where she has been; returning to familiar roads “she realized that every ranch she passed had lost a boy, lost them early and late, boys smiling, sure in their risks, healthy, tipped out of the current of life by liquor and acceleration, rodeo smashups, bad horses, deep irrigation ditches, tractor rollovers and ‘unloaded’ guns ...” This is the territory Proulx stakes out for herself. Who needs hell when you have Wyoming?

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