Bird Cloud is Proulx's property porn

I've long harboured a literary crush on Annie Proulx. At her best she's a world-class stylist, her prose as richly moist as her sensibility is dry. She can be a consummate storyteller too, as confident concocting such sparse, rugged stories of longing as Brokeback Mountain as she is with blustering narratives of pithy, pioneer resolve like That Old Ace in the Hole. Either way, Proulx's tales are always outsider romances, liberally sprinkled with the muscular, gnomic wit that has become the author's trademark.

Place always plays a big part in Proulx's work and you never have to scratch the surface hard to see the gnarly, tarnished interactions between dust-blown plains or roiling seas and the human psyche below.

In this respect Bird Cloud is no different, though to call this a memoir doesn't quite cut it. It's more of a collection of essays and recollections, loosely themed around the idea of home, the largest section documenting Proulx's attempts over a couple of years to build her dream house on a large and rugged slab of riverside property in rural Carbon County, Wyoming. A Year in Provence goes Wild West.

The first surprise is that Proulx's habitual flourishes of literary style have been replaced here with much cleaner, simpler journalistic prose. Nothing wrong with this except that the reader's interest is less likely to held by the writing itself than by the subject matter.
If property porn happens to be your thing, I'm sure you'll love this. Otherwise, it really isn't all that interesting. Costs spiral, architects let you down, the plumbing sucks and the floor turns out to be uneven. Nothing you wouldn't learn ad nauseam from the property bore at a dinner party.

But I'm afraid Proulx has another surprise up her sleeve. She's replaced the down-home, get your hands dirty or die trying, nature-loving, no-nonsense cowgirl author we've come to know and love through her fiction with some weird, effete, grande-dame Doppelgänger. Doppelgänger Proulx frets about her luxury problems without so much as a flicker of irony, as though they really matter. Can the concrete floor be polished to the right shade of umber? Will her specially commissioned beaten copper ceiling look too splashy?

And don't get me started on Doppelgänger Proulx's eco-hypocrisy. Oh, all right then. So, one moment she's installing solar panels, worrying that the construction noise will disturb some nesting eagles and instructing her "gang" to replace a patch of invasive non-native plants with native grasses, and the next she's driving 300 miles - 300 miles - to the nearest organic supermarket.
Folks, take my advice, the only way to get through Bird Cloud and avoid detonating with bitter, unbelieving rage is to fast forward to page 163, where you'll find a truly delightful couple of chapters about birds.