No Depth

I’m often accused of living in the dark ages. It’s not so much as living in the dark ages, it’s that my life is so busy that I don’t get to watch movies often. Between school, my daughter, work, and coaching swimming the little bit of free time I have is usually spent reading or on the computer. So when I had the opportunity to listen to the audio version of the book BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN I took it as I had not seen the movie and didn’t have time to watch it.

When I opened the box in which the audio book arrived (I belong to an audio book rental program) I thought they only shipped part of the book – there was only one disc in the box. How could that be? I quickly looked on Amazon.com and found out that this book was only a little over an hour long. I was very disappointed as many pre-teen books are longer than that!

BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN is part of a collection of short stories written by Annie Proulx called CLOSE RANGE. It features two cowboys, Jack Twist and Ennis del Mar who are young and struggling to put a roof over their heads and food on the table. Ennis is engaged and trying to earn enough money to start his family. Jack is a loner. Jack and Ennis are hired to watch over a herd of sheep during the summer on Wyoming’s Brokeback Mountain. There they find an attraction to each other that Ennis had never experienced before and although Jack never says otherwise it is assumed that he may have been involved with a man in the past. The attraction grows and the romance seems purely physical. At the end of summer, each man goes his own way and goes on with the life he had planned before their encounter. Ennis and Jack see each other again a few years later after Ennis is married with two daughters. Jack is also married with a son. Although they try to focus on their friendship, their meeting again soon turns sexual. This is the pattern of their lives – they go on with their marriages, work, etc. and see each other every so many years. When they do it’s fireworks and the attraction is something they can’t deny.

!!!!SPOILER!!!!

The story continues like this until Jack no longer stumbles into Ennis’ life and he finds out Jack died in an accident. When he visits Jack’s parents, he learns how he died and how much Jack had really meant to him. It’s an anticlimactic ending but then again there isn’t much meat to this entire story.
!!!!END SPOILER!!!!

It focuses on a friendship that turns sexual and later the two men realize that they do love each other. What the story doesn’t tell is anything about the two men other than cursory information. We don’t find out what makes either of them tick. We don’t learn anything in-depth about their relationships with the wives or children in their lives. We don’t learn much at all other than they stumble into each other’s lives every few years.

Character development was lacking as was the details of the plot. This book could have offered so much more to the reader and I finished it feeling very let down. The story is mostly narration with little dialog between characters. Campbell Scott, the narrator of the audio book, did a good job with his western accents but he couldn’t put enough pizzazz into the book to make it interesting enough to hold my attention. It was lucky for me that this was only an hour long book.

If I had known this were only a short story and not a full length novel I probably would have passed as usually short stories don’t give me enough details to make it enjoyable and that is exactly what happened with BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN. If Proulx’s goal was to leave the reader wondering about the events of the book, then she met her goal. It did nothing for me other than to make me wonder about the characters, the story, and about the details left out. It was definitely a let down.