The amazing coldness of Annie Proulx

Reading Annie Proulx's Those Old Cowboy Songs in the O'Henry/PEN Prize Stories 2010 collection, and am struck by a number of things, first off her style, diamond hard, words chosen with care, few adjectives, few metaphors (except in dialogue), and not much dialogue, these 19th-century cowboys being of a laconic type. Also, well researched stories of the West - she's known for that, a former journalist who's gotten lots of mileage out of her love for proper nouns, as well as for the technical verbs of a craft - an impressive description in this story of process of building a remote mountain cabin. Proulx a bit of a wanderer, we would have thought she was a true New England/Atlantic Provinces writer when she struck gold with Shipping News, but then she moved to Wyoming and you'd think she's a lifelong westerner - again, the research that she does so well and that inhabits her stories rather than embellishes them (cf AS Byatt). That said: there's an amazing coldness and even misanthropy to her work. This story, about a young marriage that comes to disastrous end with husband freezing to death and wife dying in childbirth, told for a godlike omniscient POV - no survivors exist to provide the details of this story, told as a legend - but her godlike narrator does not seem to like the humans below. The people in her stories are generally hard and cruel, and the good ones come to back ends almost invariably, the world a tough place. Proulx's compelling writing seduces you into accepting her world view for a moment, but on reflection it's good to wonder: Is this really the place that we inhabit?