Why Annie Proulx writes the American West better than almost anyone

I've written a lot about the American west and some of the epic books that it has given us from Lonesome Dove to Blood Meridian. 

Traditionally, when you mention the American West it's easy to picture the familiar mythology: cowboys riding beneath endless skies, frontier grit, freedom waiting just beyond the horizon. It is a landscape that has been romanticised for generations, transformed into a symbol as much as a place.

Then you read Annie Proulx. and the West is something altogether different. It is beautiful, but it is also unforgiving. The wind strips the land bare. Winter is not picturesque but dangerous. Distance isolates as much as it liberates. People are shaped by the country they inhabit, often in ways they barely understand themselves.

After Lonesome Dove: why Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy is the Western to read next

For many readers, Lonesome Dove is not simply a favourite novel but a defining one. It leaves such an indelible impression. 

It certainly did for me. It arrives with deceptive ease, settles in slowly, and leaves behind the feeling of having lived another life. Its greatness lies not only in its characters, vast landscape and epic scope, but also in its sense of finality. It says what it needs to say, fully and generously.

Which is precisely why it is best left alone.