Brokeback Mountain: a story review.
This is chock-full of spoilers for the story. Haven't seen the movie. There are footnotes, because I like footnotes. This is also long, and possibly boring. I took too many lit-crit courses in college, and what's worse, I enjoyed them. This is the result.
Characterization
Read Brokeback Mountain by Annie Proulx; can't decide if it's well-written or not. I like her characterization. Ennis and Jack feel v. natural as people, as men. They rationalize, they delude themselves and each other, they drink too much, they get violent. They cheat on their wives with women and each other, neglect their kids, and lack scruples in both work and personal dealings. They're weak; they're human. Are they likeable? Do they make sympathetic characters? It's hard to tell.
One thing the story accomplishes beautifully to is drive home the point that Ennis' passivity is what controls the course of their lives. Each are what they've been made, carved and eroded by circumstances, but Jack's got this need for more, a jangly energy pushing him to strive, to actually cultivate dreams and fight to achieve them.
This is nicely foreshadowed in his bitching about sleeping out with the sheep, at the v. beginning, and carries on throughout the story: he wants better, and as his feelings for Ennis grow, his dreams become more grand than simply staying at the base camp instead of commuting four hours a day. Those dreams are dependant on others, though-- he lacks the strength to make things happen on his own. His vulnerability in this is tragic.
Ennis, OTOH, is content to just drift, tumbleweed-fashion, through life on one shitty job after another and accept whatever's thrown at him. Alma leaves him? Fine. Jack's got a plan to get some money so we can be together? Can't be bothered. This is a man controlled by his fear. He's been shaped by what what he saw happen to old Earl, in his childhood, and is afraid of the strength of his emotions. He's thrown up his hands and given up, because all wanting does is make you hurt.
I get the feeling that he's managed to survive by maintaining a sort of numbness about the world at large, and the only thing that shakes him up is Jack. I think that's where his anger at Jack comes from, because Jack jolts him free from his apathy and makes him feel, and care, and want; Jack wakes in him longings that had died long ago, and it scrapes him raw.
Transformation
Here's the funny thing, however: his catch-phrase is "if you can't fix it, you've got to stand it" and at first it seems like he just "stands" everything rather than trying to fix it. If the point of a story is to show how a character transforms, for better or worse, through the course of it, Ennis remains stagnant. Even at the end, in his scene with Jack's parents, he simply gives in and accepts their decision to bury Jack's ashes in the family plot. He's just as despondent as he was in the beginning, when his truck died, preventing him from finishing high school.
For all his hard life, however, Ennis never learns anything about the transitory nature of pain, and that yeah, it hurts, but it will go away eventually, and what you get just might be worth it. Jack knows this, as we see from his description of his rodeo injuries; he knows that arm fracture's going to hurt like a bitch but he gets on the bull anyway. His will is stronger than his fear of the pain. So, in the end, Ennis never stands any pain if he can help it, but he never acts to "fix" the situation, either. He's a contradiction, and I can't decide if it makes him a hypocrite or simply a tragic figure.
Jack's character transforms, but it's just as sad; he goes from a scrappy little thing, ambitious, to well-fed and tired; a slightly more successful version of Ennis. Accepting Ennis' modus operandi killed who he was; his death is a symbol of that more than anything else.
Mechanics
There are snarled strings of comma-clogged sentences*; commas are not all-purpose punctuation marks, and should not be used with flagrant abandon when proper usage calls for hypens, ellipses, colons, semi-colons, or even-- dare I say it?-- the full stop, aka "the period". Sentences need not be so convoluted that the reader is mentally breaking them down for easier comprehension. However, you also get rather masterful, mood-evoking use of words** that practically make the scene leap from the pages, fully-formed, like Athena from the brow of Zeus. <-- FEAR MY SIMILE SUPAH POWAHS.
I found far too many instances of telling instead of showing, and flashbacks to pertinent scenes that wrecked the rhythm of the narrative instead of enhancing it-- if it's important enough to include in the story, why not let us see it as it happens, instead of just telling us it happened, or mentioning it ten years after the fact? There are many opportunities to bring us these powerful scenes, and she just misses them.
I can't stop wondering why, exactly. Perhaps it's because this story, to have been done properly, needs to be at least a several-chapter novella instead of a mere short story (if the characters are to be given the due they deserve). This shortcut-taking makes me feel like Jack and Ennis were really gypped out of their tale.
Also, I found the distance she took in relating their feelings made the story feel remote instead of involving, and rather than be affected by what should have been a profound scene when Jack says he wishes he could quit Ennis, or at the end when Ennis finds the shirts in Jack's room, it left me uninvolved. There's a detachment there, almost a coldness, between author and characters.
The story feels more like a documentary, a scientific study with prodding and microscopes, than a work of fiction. I am mostly unmoved by their relationship, their fate, all of it. The characters are interesting in a cerebral way, but I don't feel for them. It's possible that Proulx purposefully wrote with such detachment to mirror Ennis' own; if so, it's an interesting way of approaching narration but ultimately it fails, IMO, as it keeps the reader (or at least this reader) from really identifying with or feeling much for the characters.
* "They were raised on small, poor ranches in opposite corners of the state, Jack Twist in Lightning Flat, up on the Montana border, Ennis del Mar from around Sage, near the Utah line, both high-school drop-out country boys with no prospects, brought up to hard work and privation, both rough-mannered, rough-spoken, inured to the stoic life."
** "The cold air sweetened, banded pebbles and crumbs of soil cast sudden pencil-long shadows, and the rearing lodgepole pines below them massed in slabs of somber malachite."