SOURCE: Rackstraw, Loree. “Painful Irresolution.” North American Review 274, no. 3 (September 1989): 67–69.

In the following excerpt, Rackstraw offers a positive assessment of Heart Songs and Other Stories.

According to master fictionist R. V. Cassill, the short story is “a refuge for those who want to explore the human condition as sentient men and women.” This traditional view is central to recent collections of short fiction by Richard Lyons and E. Annie Proulx. Lyons's volume of ten stories [A Wilderness of Faith and Love] takes the reader on a sometimes terrifying, sometimes hilarious probing of sexual longing which verges on the metaphysical in its intense intimacy. [In Heart Songs,] Proulx invents a more poetic distance in nine stories that trade intimacy for nearly pristine simile to reveal touching and bizarre struggles of country folk. Both make vivid the painful irresolution of human need, although Proulx softens that pain with irony. Lyons...