Caroline 's Reviews > Brokeback Mountain

***NO SPOILERS***

“Gay cowboy love story” may be how it’s often summed up, but that’s flippant. Brokeback Mountain is emotional, resonant, and ultimately gut-wrenching—and quietly so. This is a humble story, tightly focused almost exclusively on young Wyoming cowboys Ennis and Jack as they spend a summer working together on Brokeback Mountain. Before long they’re forced to reconcile their love for each other with their everyday, conventional, socially acceptable lives.

What’s most powerful about Brokeback Mountain is the frightening reality facing these two, that they would be in danger if together, not just frowned upon and harassed:

Jack, I don’t want a be like them guys you see around sometimes. And I don’t want a be dead. There was these two old guys ranched together down home, Earl and Rich—Dad would pass a remark when he seen them. They was a joke even though they was pretty tough old birds. I was what, nine years old and they found Earl dead in a irrigation ditch. They’d took a tire iron to him, spurred him up, drug him around by his dick until it pulled off, just bloody pulp. What the tire iron done looked like pieces a burned tomatoes all over him, nose tore down from skiddin on gravel.

Proulx bravely addressed a taboo topic head-on but refrained from pushing an agenda or manipulating emotions. Brokeback Mountain is a story she constructed around a reality; there’s a sincerity to what happens in these pages. A surprise toward the end takes the story in a direction the reader won’t predict, and it’s perfect, true to the overall serious, introspective tone but also reinforcing Proulx’s message well.