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Not-so-great plains: two Pulitzer prize winners attempt to lasso the look and culture of the state''s emptiest quarter--with mixed results.

Article Excerpt
IN 1916 GEORGIA O'KEEFFE, WHO was then living in Canyon, wrote a friend back East about the beauty of the sky in that vast, open country: "The whole sky--and there is so much of it out here--was just blazing--and grey blue clouds were rioting all through the hotness of it--and the ugly little buildings and windmills looked great against it." O'Keeffe's enthusiasm for the plains of West Texas finds its fictional corollary in novels by two Pulitzer prize-winning authors, Annie Proulx and Suzan-Lori Parks. [paragraph] Proulx's novel, That Old Ace in the Hole (Scribner, 2002), is set in the Panhandle, where the author apparently spent considerable time; her extensive "Acknowledgments" indicates indebtedness to locals including various librarians, a fiddle player, farmers, a guy who fixed a flat for her, mad somewhat coyly, one "Larry McMurtry of Booked Up in Archer City." Parks, an avant-garde Playwright, lived for a while in Odessa when she was a child, the area where the somewhat clankingly titled Getting Mother's Body (Random House, 2003) begins. Their works are valiant but not always successful attempts to come to grips with the ethos mad the landscape of the state's emptiest quarter. [paragraph] Proulx tries to take Texas' pulse mad parse its past. She is so hip she even alludes to a certain magazine: In an office in Houston, her...

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