Penthesilea -- I apologize for not responding to this earlier.
Back to the OP:
Judging on what I've read from Proulx (which is not much, allowedly) it's typical for Proulx to come off-hand, in half-sentences with crucial informations. Moreso, she likes to gut-punch her readers through the backdoor. A story may flow along - but then, in the last paragraph, or even in the last sentence, there comes the punch.
A good example for this is the story, which in German is called: "In Hell, all you want is a glass of Water" I just transalted the German title and hope the original one is the same or at least close enough for you to know what story I'm speaking of.
At the end of said story, a long-ago act of deathly violence is illustrated. Then she writes: "We're heading for a new millenium now and such things don't happen any more. A likely story!"
I've only read about half the stories in
Close Range and (ages ago)
The Shipping News, so I don't have a good sense of how much Proulx uses the same writing techniques in different stories. I did read "People in Hell Just Want a Drink of Water" (the title in English is pretty close to the German translation), and I know what you mean about the punch in the ending. (That story, though. Argh. That's the last one I read in
Close Range -- I couldn't pick up the book again after that. Well, except for BBM, but I bought the book for BBM.)
I'm wondering if she uses techniques like that in novels, as well? It's been so long since I read
The Shipping News that I can't remember. (And I've got a copy of
Postcards, but then there was a murder on the first page and... I just thought, "I need
more sex and less violence in my reading life," and put it down. I just needed to read something less bleak than Annie Proulx.)
Anyway, I asked about novels, because it seems like the punch at the end is very much a technique used to make short fiction powerful. It reminds me of the twist endings that O. Henry is famous for (and the only story of his that I've ever read is the one about the guy and his wife buying Christmas presents for one another, but I know his other stories are supposed to have surprise endings, too). And it reminded me, actually, of a technique that a friend of mine uses when she writes drabbles (100-word fan fiction pieces) -- her drabbles always feel especially complete and poignant to me, because she always manages to set up a scene and then make some kind of emotional or thought-provoking twist at the end. (She doesn't write BBM fanfic, so most of you wouldn't know her.) And she knows a lot more about writing than I do, so maybe she does it deliberately because she knows it's a good technique to use in short fiction. I've never talked to her about it, though.
What comes to my mind is Proulx's description of the boys: "rough-mannerd and rough-spoken": Ennis peeing in the sink, Jack saying he missed Ennis bad enough sometimes to make him whip babies. How much more loveable is the confession in the movie "miss you so bad I can hardly stand it".
Yes! I agree entirely. In some ways, the very rough-spokenness of the boys in the story makes the discovery of the tenderness all that more powerful. But on the other hand... well, I'm glad the line about whipping babies isn't in the movies. It would have detracted from the mood in that scene, to say the least.
(The sink-peeing amuses me, though. I wouldn't put it in the movie, but as a story detail, it makes me laugh, when I think about it. I mean -- talk about going a level beyond leaving the toilet seat up!)