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The virtues of being home, staying home, knowing home. Landscape and place, and the vast emotional terrain they contain. This is well-trodden ground out here in the West, where books are expected to extol the virtues of physical space. Name five books set in the West in which place isn't paramount.

To be fair, we residents of the West are daily influenced -- and in part defined -- by space, mountains, sky, terrain, weather, and nature. As the staple of western literature, the gun-toting cowboy has been replaced by the sensitive observer; the new myth we operate under is that contemporary westerners give our attention to landscape, shadows, silences. We chase cows and find rare rocks. We are more at home in our solitude than we are with people. This holds especially true for western women, who are expected to get tough -- to "cowboy up," as the bumper stickers on pickups proclaim -- and look out for the integrity of our landscapes.

Such is certainly the case with writers of the stature of Annie Proulx and Leslie Marmon Silko, whose new memoirs implicitly inquire into what it means to be a denizen of the contemporary West. The question is, can they accomplish the writer's difficult task of recognizing well-worn tropes and simultaneously transcending them? What can they say about place that hasn't already been said?

Both of these writers seem well equipped to answer that question, since both are known for their cliché-busting writing -- Silko's breakout novel, Ceremony, and Proulx's short story "Brokeback Mountain," to cite just two examples. So when these women turn from fiction to memoir and offer up something new (Silko's first book in 10 years; Proulx's first work of nonfiction in more than 20), the reader is predisposed to expect something as new and grand as the western skies.

Both start at home. Silko's book is structured around the near-daily walks she takes from her house through the arroyos of the Sonoran Desert in Arizona. Via these wanderings, we come to see her view of the wildlife, plants, weather, and, most of all, rocks -- particularly the fragments that originate in a "turquoise ledge" in the Tucson Mountains. Her finds are as varied as her narrative, which is made up of minuets of personal story and struggle, bits of complex family heritage, and forays into her spiritual life. The Turquoise Ledge shows us a woman richly comfortable in her world of young rattlesnakes and billowing clouds.

Proulx's book is structured not around walks from her home but around the building of it. In what might be called a foolhardy act, she bought 640 acres next to the North Platte River in Wyoming. On this remote acreage, which she named "Bird Cloud," she hoped to build her dream home. What she finds (to no one's surprise, except perhaps her own) is the chaos and disappointment that house-building generally creates. Yet the experience offers her a chance to know the place. "I became more intensely aware of the seasons, animal movements, plant behavior," she says, which is fortunate for the reader, as she takes us on her encounters with eagles, elk, antelope, and, yes, stones.

Both writers are solitary women, alone in their domiciles, but both are comfortable in this state; neither breathes a word about seeking a companion or wishing for a partner. Both are chroniclers of their particular culture and time and place. Above all, both are naturalists by instinct and experience -- and herein lie the greatest rewards of both books. Silko, for example, rambles into a wonderful discussion of the process by which turquoise is created (it doesn't originate in the earth, as many precious stones do, but forms when chemical reactions take place during the weathering of surface minerals). The highlight of Proulx's work comes as she climbs around on a cliff with shelves separated by steep colluvium deposits and discovers relics of the Late Archaic period in a "vein of glistening dark chert...everywhere were thousands of flakes and larger fractured chunks, discarded small cutting tools and hammerstones."

We come to know a place through these specifics and the relationships among them. Silko and Proulx share the same foundation: rocks, arrowheads, trees, birds, rattlesnakes, clouds, and the way all of these interact. And that detail allows us to see the larger scope of the West with new clarity.

In their ways of looking at home, these two women are at opposite ends of the spectrum. Silko regards rocks and creatures as friends; Proulx is a calculating, distant, and unsentimental observer. Silko is a lyric poet; Proulx's writing is razor sharp. Silko is at home in her place; Proulx is not so sure (she eventually declares her new house uninhabitable in winter). Silko is gentle to the point of sentimentality; Proulx describes herself as "bossy, impatient, reclusively shy, short-tempered, single-minded." Such comparisons are not always helpful, but reading these memoirs side by side reminds us that the ways to inhabit place are as varied as the stars.

In the end, both authors avoid the biggest pitfall of all -- the temptation to mythologize and romanticize the western landscape. The key is their honesty and frankness, most evident in their unflinching assessment of the myriad threats. No room for dreamy nostalgia there. Proulx writes of the ravages of the mountain pine beetle, noting that "most of the lodgepole forests of Colorado and southern Wyoming are now standing dead." She finds it astonishing (and I agree) that so many people outside the West have no idea of this; it "remains something of a millions-of-acres secret." Silko worries too -- about the lack of water, the dire effects of atomic bomb tests and uranium mining. She feels the "suffering and distress of so many living beings" and the "anxious angry energy" it creates. Both books say to us: please see the beauty of this place, become mesmerized by it, be aware of the dangers.

Perhaps none of this is entirely new. Home is a loaded concept, and breaking myths is a tough chore. And yet I can think of women writers who have shown me a West that I didn't know, with insights that take my breath away. Alexandra Fuller does that in her depiction of Wyoming's gas-field culture in The Legend of Colton H. Bryant. So does the Montana writer Judy Blunt in her book of essays, Breaking Clean. Or Louise Erdrich with her depictions of Ojibwa communities in North Dakota in her novel Four Souls.

But Silko and Proulx, these two solitary, rock-finding female Thoreaus of the West, give it a good stab, and if nothing else, they offer fine evocations of place that become meditations on the importance of home, even if (or especially if) that home ultimately makes us feel small and the scope of our importance minuscule. "Walking on the land or digging in the fine soil," writes Proulx, "I am intensely aware that time quivers slightly, changes occurring in imperceptible and minute ways....Yet the tiny shifts in everything -- cell replication, the rain of dust motes, lengthening hair, wind-pushed rocks -- press inexorably on and on."

And perhaps that is enough.