Sun, Mar 13, 2011 page14

• Hardcover: US: Home on the range

  Annie Proulx’s tale of house-building woe is as charmless as it is uninspiring

  • By Kathryn Hughes / The Guardian, London
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  Such is the charged magic of Annie Proulx’s prose that you might think there is no subject it cannot render luminous. But try Polygal. It crops up rather a lot in Proulx’s latest book and, no matter how hard she tries, she cannot make this particular brand of polycarbonate plastic sing. And it’s not Polygal’s fault, either. Much of Bird Cloud, Proulx’s first non-fiction book for 20 years, remains inert, as stubbornly charmless as the Wyoming wilderness in which it squats.

  Bird Cloud is subtitled “a memoir” but anyone hoping that Proulx is going to reveal all will be disappointed. Instead what she offers is an account of two years in the middle of the last decade during which she attempted to build her dream house — aka Bird Cloud — on a plot of wind-scoured land strung out along the North Platte River. There’s trauma aplenty here, but not of the misery-memoir kind. Taps leak, the wrong building parts arrive and the state-of-the-art concrete floor turns a funny color. The Polygal creaks and snaps alarmingly in the night. The house that was intended as “a poem in wood” turns out to be more of an argument in expensively sourced materials from around the world.

  All this might seem a long way from Proulx’s usual beat of exquisite ordinariness. In novels and short stories such as The Shipping News and Brokeback Mountain, her quiet, sinewy characters find their worlds split apart by disturbances far more profound than a dodgy boiler or misfiring color scheme. But while Proulx’s focus may have altered in its shift from fiction to autobiography, her style has not. As a result wrangles with soft furnishings are conveyed in that plucked prose she normally reserves for characters negotiating the overwhelming tides of geography and history. The effect is like one of those classy parlor games where you are required to rewrite the Highway Code in the style of Hemingway.

  

  Bird Cloud by Annie Proulx

  Of course, it isn’t all like this. Proulx, who is 75, has picked this patch of Wyoming for her dream home — rather than, say, a retirement complex in Florida — precisely because it is strung with those deep narratives of time and place that she has made her own. It turns out that her 263-hectare plot has been the stage for many a chapter of animal and human history. Volcanoes once erupted here and dinosaurs ambled; the Ute and Arapaho Indians made peace and war for centuries. And then in 1849 came the covered wagons, carrying hardscrabble families across the central plains of North America. Each migration left its trail in the form of displaced rocks, still-traceable tracks and buried ephemera. When Proulx isn’t fussing over the tatami matting in her meditation room, she likes to roam her scrubby estate with her husky builders, scratching for clues to the land’s previous tenants.

  What, though, do the husky builders feel about this? Early in Bird Cloud Proulx immodestly declares that one of her good points is an ability “to put myself in others’ shoes constantly.” But on the evidence of this memoir she has an almost total lack of interest in the people subsumed in her all-consuming project. The builders, whom she turns into faux-cowboys by calling them “the James Gang,” don’t seem to have any choice when the lady with the checkbook demands that they down tools and help her hunt for arrowheads. Various contractors pass through the site and are rechristened according to her needs as “Mr Floorfix” or “Mr Solar.” Her family makes quick pitstops but, doubtless deterred by the drama of the apparently homicidal windows, sensibly continue on their way to somewhere more soothing.

  Worse still is the tone of clumsily disguised self-regard that trickles into the corners of Proulx’s narrative. She does that annoying thing of constantly telling us how many books she has (“more than you” is the clear message). When, using her imported Japanese bath for the first time, there’s a massive flood into the library below, I found myself sneakily pleased. She also graciously lets us in on the special living requirements of internationally successful writers: they need attics to store their luggage because, you see, they are required to travel so much. Terrific stylist that she usually is, Proulx even lets slip such blushingly formulated musings as “I find innovative architecture extremely interesting.”

  All this self-satisfaction might have been bearable had Proulx built a house which a) we could see and b) she could actually live in. But this is the sort of posh memoir that doesn’t include photographs, as if to deter the kind of slummy reader who likes to have a good old nose around people’s lives. And as for b), well, Proulx discovers halfway through the project that the road to Bird Cloud is impassable from November to March. This is tricky. So the upshot is that one of the world’s greatest writers has built an expensive summer cottage.

  For your information

  Publication Notes:

  Bird Cloud By Annie Proulx 288 pages Fourth Estate
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