Brokeback Mountain
Twenty-eight pages that contain more longing, grief, and waste than most novels manage in three hundred. Ennis and Jack's summer together and the decades of denial that follow ("I wish I knew how to quit you") is the queer love story that broke into mainstream literary culture. Economical and devastating.
The most frequent complaint is pacing: readers say the story moves too fast for its emotional stakes, so the central relationship reads as “far too rushed to get the emotional impact.” A related charge goes further, with some readers admitting “I didn't ever feel that they were in love,” reading the bond as built mainly around physical attraction, summed up bluntly by one reviewer as a story about “how two men really really enjoy having sex with each other.” A number of reviewers say outright “I do think the movie is better,” an unusual reaction for readers who came to the source material expecting the reverse. Because the story runs so short, side characters get little room, with Ennis's wife left carrying suffering that stays mostly unexplored, and the famous Wyoming landscape reads as only lightly sketched on the page.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
