Proulx tears apart the traditional script

Fine Just the Way It Is. By Annie Proulx, Fourth Estate, €17.20

‘There is no happiness,” writes Annie Proulx in Them Old Cowboy Songs, the most powerful story in this eclectic, uncompromising collection, ‘‘like that of a young couple in a little house they have built themselves in a place of beauty and solitude.”

It’s a sentence designed to amplify the reader’s alarm bells, which are already resounding from Proulx’s brief preface to ...