"FINE JUST THE WAY IT IS: Wyoming Stories 3," by Annie Proulx. Scribner; 221 pages; $25.
WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — Midway through Annie Proulx's latest series of exercises in dolor, I became restless, because the pattern was relentless: tough, solitary Westerners undone by malicious fate. Beyond admiring the sentences - and Proulx remains a lovely writer of sentences - there's not a lot of variety, enlightenment, or pleasure to be had in waiting for the hammer to fall ... over and over again.
In "Family Man," an 84 year-old man in a Wyoming retirement home finally unburdens himself of the horrible family secret he's been hiding for three quarters of a century, only to find that the granddaughter taping his reminiscences is too stupid to realize what he's saying. At which point he shuts up and goes back to waiting to die.
"Them Old Cowboy Songs" tells the story of a young couple in the Wyoming of 120 years ago. In search of a job, the husband leaves his wife to have their baby by herself. He eventually freezes to death, and she dies in childbirth, but not before dragging herself outside to bury the stillborn child.
"Testimony of the Donkey" tells the story of Marc and Catlin, a couple whose only true bond comes from exploring the wild country. They have a fight, he goes off to fight wildfires in Greece, and she goes hiking, where something very bad happens to her that wouldn't have happened if Marc was still with her.
A fairly uneventful story entitled "The Great Divide," involves an older cowboy who's rounding up wild horses until a hoof clips him on the thigh, breaking his leg. He's fine, but by the time they get him to the hospital in a pickup truck, he's dead because he threw a clot and his heart jammed shut.
In all periods of the West, in nearly all of these stories, the denouement is senseless death.
If Wyoming was really this lethal, it would have a population of eight.
Proulx seems to know there's a repetitious quality to this batch of stories, because she tries to break it up with a couple of comic vignettes featuring the Devil and his primary minion, Duane Fork.
"I've Always Loved This Place" involves the Devil devising a tenth circle of hell. It seems like he needs a hobby of some sort, because he doesn't really have very much to do. He has just returned from a design and garden show in Milan, posing as an avante garde furniture designer who works only in crushed paper.
After idly checking his e-mail (Devil AT hell.org) he decides to model the tenth circle on the combined worst features of the world's worst airports: petty officials, sadistic staffing, multiple security checks of increasing harshness, fluctuating gate changes and departure times, with the centerpiece being a 27-hour flight in an overcrowded airplane that flies through storms so severe that rivets pop off the fuselage.
These two stories are funny, when they're not being cute - at one point Charon asks the Devil if he remembered to bring his eyedrops - but they're not funny enough to make you forget that they're arbitrary intellectual slapstick meant to divert us from the brutal nihilism of the rest of the stories.
Even a semi-comic story about a sagebrush that vaguely looks like a child with its arms raised and is adopted by an insane, childless woman who feeds the sagebrush gravy and meat juice until it becomes a carnivore would be a lot better if it didn't play like a Wyoming version of "Little Shop of Horrors."
And another thing, Proulx's characters are cliches.
The men are all leathery and you have to blast for their sentences; the women are tough and long-suffering. They say things like, "Missus McLaverty, I wouldn't work in no mine. You married you a cowboy." They have names like Antip Bewley, Wacky Lipe, Bunk Peck, Sink Gartrell, Bill Fur, and Harp Daft, which is a very awkward way of trying to convince the reader that people with names like these must live in different times than ours.
Proulx's attitude toward all this is a shrug that comes perilously close to indifference. As one of her characters puts it, "Some lived and some died, and that's how it was." The only leavening element is her gift for prose, which is undiminished: "He looked a little vicious, like an old artist whose eye is offended by contemporary daubs."
But these stories are littered with more corpses than the final scene of "Hamlet." Cumulatively, it's exhausting.
Scott Eyman writes for The Palm Beach Post. E-mail: seyman AT pbpost.com