Sean had big-time problems with the movie, but the weirdest criticism was on the subject of names:
The story was inane — characters named “Lureen” and “Alma” and “Ennis Del Mar.” A gay cowboy named “Jack Twist.” Jack Twist? You’ve got to be kidding me. E. Annie Proulx lived in Wyoming, but I’ll guarantee you that if you threw a rock into a roadhouse in the early ’60s, you wouldn’t hit a single “Alma” or “Lureen” or “Ennis.” Stephanie Zacharek has a funny line about this in her review:
Their names — straight out of a boy’s adventure book of the 1930s, or maybe just the result of a long think on the front porch at some writers’ colony…
When I first read the story, I thought, ooh, great names. But then I started to doubt myself. Are the names too much? Could you really throw a rock into a rockhouse and not hit a single Alma or Ennis or Lureen? My suspicion was no. (But then, I did grow up in a town that had a resident listed as “Butts, Caressa”).
Armed with my handy reference librarian skills, I set out on a quest to dissect the heart of America’s phone listings, and here’s what I came up with:
- 839 guys named Ennis
- 583 Almas
- 63 Del Mars
- 26 Lureens (one from Bowling Green, Ohio!)
- 3 listings for a “Twist, Jack” : one in Audubon, IA, one in Catonsville, MD, and one in Jackson, MI
But the biggest kicker:
- Twist, J, Riverton, WY
Someone living under an alias?
