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A review by jennyshank
Bird Cloud by Annie Proulx
3.0
http://www.star-telegram.com/2011/01/26/2796233/annie-proulx-tells-of-her-vivid.html
Annie Proulx tells of her vivid life on a 'Cloud'
Posted Thursday, Jan. 27, 2011 0 Comments Print Share Share Reprints
By Jenny Shank
Special to the Star-Telegram
If there's any writer with a life and mind intriguing enough to merit a memoir, it's Annie Proulx, who didn't publish her first book of fiction until she was in her 50s, then quickly won just about every award available to an American writer. Proulx's geographical-chameleon nature is unusual for a writer whose work is so linked to landscape -- she grew up in New England, spent her early adulthood there and set the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning novel The Shipping News in Newfoundland. Later, she moved to Wyoming, where she set three quirky and often breathtaking short-story collections, filled with details and observations that seem like they'd only occur to a lifelong Westerner.
Readers will come to Bird Cloud, Proulx's first book of autobiographical nonfiction, hoping to glean some insights about what makes this exceptional writer tick, and they'll find some answers, but so will they be left with perhaps more questions from this beautifully written but somewhat frustrating book. Bird Cloud encompasses a bit of introspection and family history, an account of the trials of building Proulx's dream house in Wyoming, notes on wildlife, and a discussion of human and natural history of the area.
The story opens in March 2005, with Proulx's reflections on the geographical features of the 640 acres of Wyoming land she had recently purchased from the Nature Conservancy, a tract she named Bird Cloud. The extraordinary beauty of this spot drew Proulx in; it features a dramatic, 400-foot cliff, under which the North Platte River flows, attracting a riot of bird activity. She hopes to build a house where she can live alone with nature and her beloved library of history and science books. She finds out that Bird Cloud is not ideally suited to human habitation, especially in the winter, but she plunges ahead with the project.
"Well do I know my own character negatives," she writes, "bossy, impatient, reclusively shy, short-tempered, single-minded. The good parts are harder to see, but I suppose a fair dose of sympathy and even compassion is there, a by-product of the writer's imagination. I can and do put myself in others' shoes constantly. Observational skills, quick decisions (not a few bad ones), and a tendency to overreach, to stretch comprehension and try difficult things are part of who I am."
Bird Cloud next skips to Proulx's early life -- born in 1935, she moved with her family incessantly while her father, a French Canadian, searched for better jobs in his quest for respectability. Proulx delves into her family genealogy, the most interesting aspect of which is the conclusion a reader can draw from it: Through her success, Proulx has completed her father's journey out of generations of poverty toward wealth and cultural prestige. After a peripatetic childhood and adulthood, Proulx has earned the grand, expensive house that she sets out to build in the next part of the book. Whether this is of interest probably depends on how well the reader is faring in the current economy.
The blow-by-blow of the building of Proulx's house is the most entertaining part. In her fiction, Proulx writes incisively about distinctive local characters, and the workmen in Bird Cloud are vivid. There's Harry Teague, the Aspen-based architect she hires to design the house, and "the James gang," a group of brothers Proulx finds after trial and error with less reliable workmen, who are tireless perfectionists and come as close to achieving Proulx's dream as anybody could.
Although Proulx's sympathies in her fiction usually lie with Wyoming natives like the James gang, we learn that Proulx, in her quest for the perfect Japanese soak tub, solar panels and Brazilian floor tiles, might be more like the outsiders she poked fun at in her story Man Crawling Out of Trees, in which a New York couple buys a home in Wyoming, one of the many pine-log "estates" that resulted when ranch widows "dumped the cows and called up the real estate brokers, who sketched out thirty-five-acre ranchettes." The couple proceed to lavishly outfit their new home, as does Proulx.
Proulx must move into the house before the work is completed, which aggravates her and disrupts her writing. Gradually the construction finishes, but she realizes the problems of the site she selected. She concludes, "I had to face the fact that no matter how much I loved the place it was not, and never could be, the final home of which I had dreamed."
But wait -- did Proulx sell the house after all this? (She told the Los Angeles Times in 2008 that she was moving to New Mexico.) Will she set any more fiction in Wyoming? And how exactly does she write her fiction? Although Proulx's memoir preserves her mystery on these and other points, fans of her prose and nature descriptions will find much to savor in Bird Cloud, at least until Proulx's next work of fiction appears.
Read more: http://www.star-telegram.com/2011/01/26/2796233/annie-proulx-tells-of-her-vivid.html#tvg#ixzz1Cd4lNHr7
Annie Proulx tells of her vivid life on a 'Cloud'
Posted Thursday, Jan. 27, 2011 0 Comments Print Share Share Reprints
By Jenny Shank
Special to the Star-Telegram
If there's any writer with a life and mind intriguing enough to merit a memoir, it's Annie Proulx, who didn't publish her first book of fiction until she was in her 50s, then quickly won just about every award available to an American writer. Proulx's geographical-chameleon nature is unusual for a writer whose work is so linked to landscape -- she grew up in New England, spent her early adulthood there and set the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning novel The Shipping News in Newfoundland. Later, she moved to Wyoming, where she set three quirky and often breathtaking short-story collections, filled with details and observations that seem like they'd only occur to a lifelong Westerner.
Readers will come to Bird Cloud, Proulx's first book of autobiographical nonfiction, hoping to glean some insights about what makes this exceptional writer tick, and they'll find some answers, but so will they be left with perhaps more questions from this beautifully written but somewhat frustrating book. Bird Cloud encompasses a bit of introspection and family history, an account of the trials of building Proulx's dream house in Wyoming, notes on wildlife, and a discussion of human and natural history of the area.
The story opens in March 2005, with Proulx's reflections on the geographical features of the 640 acres of Wyoming land she had recently purchased from the Nature Conservancy, a tract she named Bird Cloud. The extraordinary beauty of this spot drew Proulx in; it features a dramatic, 400-foot cliff, under which the North Platte River flows, attracting a riot of bird activity. She hopes to build a house where she can live alone with nature and her beloved library of history and science books. She finds out that Bird Cloud is not ideally suited to human habitation, especially in the winter, but she plunges ahead with the project.
"Well do I know my own character negatives," she writes, "bossy, impatient, reclusively shy, short-tempered, single-minded. The good parts are harder to see, but I suppose a fair dose of sympathy and even compassion is there, a by-product of the writer's imagination. I can and do put myself in others' shoes constantly. Observational skills, quick decisions (not a few bad ones), and a tendency to overreach, to stretch comprehension and try difficult things are part of who I am."
Bird Cloud next skips to Proulx's early life -- born in 1935, she moved with her family incessantly while her father, a French Canadian, searched for better jobs in his quest for respectability. Proulx delves into her family genealogy, the most interesting aspect of which is the conclusion a reader can draw from it: Through her success, Proulx has completed her father's journey out of generations of poverty toward wealth and cultural prestige. After a peripatetic childhood and adulthood, Proulx has earned the grand, expensive house that she sets out to build in the next part of the book. Whether this is of interest probably depends on how well the reader is faring in the current economy.
The blow-by-blow of the building of Proulx's house is the most entertaining part. In her fiction, Proulx writes incisively about distinctive local characters, and the workmen in Bird Cloud are vivid. There's Harry Teague, the Aspen-based architect she hires to design the house, and "the James gang," a group of brothers Proulx finds after trial and error with less reliable workmen, who are tireless perfectionists and come as close to achieving Proulx's dream as anybody could.
Although Proulx's sympathies in her fiction usually lie with Wyoming natives like the James gang, we learn that Proulx, in her quest for the perfect Japanese soak tub, solar panels and Brazilian floor tiles, might be more like the outsiders she poked fun at in her story Man Crawling Out of Trees, in which a New York couple buys a home in Wyoming, one of the many pine-log "estates" that resulted when ranch widows "dumped the cows and called up the real estate brokers, who sketched out thirty-five-acre ranchettes." The couple proceed to lavishly outfit their new home, as does Proulx.
Proulx must move into the house before the work is completed, which aggravates her and disrupts her writing. Gradually the construction finishes, but she realizes the problems of the site she selected. She concludes, "I had to face the fact that no matter how much I loved the place it was not, and never could be, the final home of which I had dreamed."
But wait -- did Proulx sell the house after all this? (She told the Los Angeles Times in 2008 that she was moving to New Mexico.) Will she set any more fiction in Wyoming? And how exactly does she write her fiction? Although Proulx's memoir preserves her mystery on these and other points, fans of her prose and nature descriptions will find much to savor in Bird Cloud, at least until Proulx's next work of fiction appears.
Read more: http://www.star-telegram.com/2011/01/26/2796233/annie-proulx-tells-of-her-vivid.html#tvg#ixzz1Cd4lNHr7