A Novelist Wills Her Dream Home Into Being - "Bird Cloud" by Annie Proulx

[groovedaddy]

There are two ways to describe Annie Proulx’s memoir, “Bird Cloud,” an account of her Sisyphean struggle to build her dream house on a remote and striking 640-acre stretch of land in Wyoming.

The angel on my right shoulder suggests something like this: “Bird Cloud” is a mildly animated and knotty book about displacement and loss, about a late-life longing to carve out a place that’s truly one’s own. Ms. Proulx, who is in her mid-70s, finds that longing frustrated at almost every turn. Admirers of her fiction will find much of this memoir to be not uninteresting.

The devil on my left shoulder whispers this: “Bird Cloud” is an especially off-putting book about a wealthy and imperious writer who annoys the local residents (she runs off their cows), overwrites about nature and believes people will sympathize with her about the bummers involved in getting her Japanese soaking tub, tatami-mat exercise area, Mexican talavera sink and Brazilian floor tiles installed just so. “Bird Cloud” is shelter porn with a side of highbrow salsa. When Ms. Proulx’s house turns out to be a bit of a folly, its roads impassable in winter, you feel that a bell somewhere has been struck, and justice served.

My sympathies are with the devil.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/05/books/05book.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha28

[NV Whino]

1. Not what you would call a positive review

I do agree that some of her later writing does not measure up to her earlier writing.