20 years later, is it time to quit 'Brokeback Mountain'?

kpa Publicity Stills / Alamy

I was in my 20s when I read the original Annie Proulx short story "Brokeback Mountain" in The New Yorker ; I was floored by it. First, because it was a Western. I'd spent years reading New Yorker fiction by then, and I didn't think they went in for Western stuff. No, I figured their genre was more White Bougie Heterosexual Alcoholics in Muted Despair, you know?

I read further and met Ennis and Jack, two sheep herders who eke out a kind of strangled, self-loathing love story on the wind-whipped slopes of a mountain in Wyoming in the 1960s. I then realized why The New Yorker had published it — not so much the story, or the characters, or the setting, but the prose.

My god, the prose . So spare, so austere, so unsentimental — yet you could feel ever