Bird Cloud – or "Broke Bank House", as I'm sure Annie Proulx was not tempted to call it – is the story of how a great and ageing American writer came across a 640-acre spread of land in Wyoming, bought it and set about designing and building (more accurately, having people build) her ideal house on it. Books are like homes, too, and within 10 pages of crossing the threshold of this one readers will put up their feet, secure in the knowledge that they won't be moving on to another any time soon.
The book is also a history of the land the house stands on, and of how Proulx's desire finally to root herself here has its roots in a childhood of endlessly upping sticks. Preparing for one such move, Annie's dad put the family's pet crow "in a hole-punched cardboard box and lashed the box to the back bumper. The poor fellow was dead when we stopped for lunch by the side of the road, asphyxiated by exhaust". This is Proulx in a nutshell, in that something one might ordinarily think of as weird (a pet crow?) is also weirdly ordinary. On the larger canvas of the novels it's like magic realism without the cloying suggestion of genre tricks (trees talking to one another etc). The magic – from the reader's point of view – derives from the way the land seems to have found its ideal, almost instinctive expression in her prose. For the author it comes from a deep knowledge of practicalities and processes – both physical and economic – that have shaped and gouged the land and its people. That instinctive voice, in other words, is immensely sophisticated and learned. (Robert Frost did something similar, but took greater pains to bake the sophistication into down-home wisdom.) Midway through construction of the house, Proulx goes to New York "to talk about Jackson Pollock and the influence of the southwest Indians on some of his early work". Her writing has a primal power but there is nothing primitive about it.
To achieve a comparable effect in her house, she enlists an imaginative architect and a sympathetic crew of perfectionist local builders whom she dubs the "James gang". Needless to say, things do not go according to plan. The extreme weather – "days that burn your eyes out of their sockets gave way within hours to new snowstorms" – makes appalling demands on materials, builders and client alike. The combination of gales and snowstorms creates drifts so huge that Proulx reconciles herself to the idea that the house is uninhabitable in winter unless she is willing to live like a castaway for four months of the year. Given her dream of a kitchen with "drawers in red, violet, aquamarine, burnt orange [and] John Deere green" in which will be served "Argentinian salads of butterhead lettuce, tomato, sweet onion, roast lamb with Greek cucumber… and dry riesling for the cook", this was never going to happen. Still, this portrait of Annie the Ranch Goddess forms a charming contrast to the "bossy, impatient, excruciatingly shy, short-tempered, single-minded" author announced at the outset. These "character negatives" have ample opportunity to flourish as difficulties, noise and disruption mount, but Proulx's imperious and frequently impractical demands are redeemed by a dry sense of her own shortcomings. The granite counters, once installed, are a great success: "Everyone liked them, even me."
The James brothers wanted to seal their original deal with a handshake but Proulx does "not lead a handshake life" and insisted on a contract. I wonder: did that contract include a confidentiality clause? I'd be very curious to hear an account of this westerly pharaonic undertaking from a point of view other than the author-client's. Especially since the whole thing – which was always going to cost a bomb – went way over budget. Not to worry; Proulx is, in her own words, "fabulously wealthy". True, I have wrenched the phrase maliciously out of context – she's actually describing her metaphorical good fortune in being able to see a bald eagle's nest and a golden eagle's nest from her dining-room window – but a view like that was never going to come cheap. Everyone involved in the project must have been conscious that the Wyoming laureate was loaded, even if she insists at the outset that she is on a "tight budget". Later she has to start "selling stock" because the house has "taken all [her] money"; eventually she is "close to broke". At this point, as the cost, troubles and detailed recounting of every little setback and achievement mount up, the comfy reader described at the beginning of this review begins to fidget. It seems that there might be a different kind of identification between building a house and composing a book than was suggested at the outset. The latter begins suspiciously to resemble a way of covering the spiralling costs of the former.
Still, eventually it's all done (if still rather dusty) and Annie is free to roam the property, quaff some of that much-anticipated riesling and do some serious weather and bird-watching. Sentence after sentence reveals the immediate and intimate relation to the physical world that forms the backdrop to her fiction: eagles standing in the shallows, "cold water soaking their fancy leggings"; an eagle and a falcon engaged in "a sky-filling quarrel"; another eagle digging its talons into a trout, struggling to get airborne and ending up "riding the fish like a surfboard down the rushing river." This is the kind of stuff I, as a reader, cannot get enough of. Strange to discover, then, that I had soon had enough of it.
Early on in the book Proulx tells of an incident when she and her sister go into a cloth shop. There is something spooky about the guy behind the counter. They leave – and we know that something is going to happen. It's barely more than an anecdote; but these few pages have the instant traction that characterises the best fiction. It turns out that without the human and narrative purchase – conspicuously lacking in the final section of Bird Cloud – Proulx's observational prowess and gift for verbally harnessing the elements cannot long sustain themselves. In the context of the book as a whole it means that one reads the day-by-day, what's-gonna-go-wrong-next? account of impediments overcome with far greater attentiveness than the passages of achieved and qualified contentment. The house is not quite the definitive resting place she hoped it would become – and the book is not quite what we hoped it might be either. That's why home, as Philip Larkin put it in an altogether cosier context, is so sad: "A joyous shot at how things ought to be,/ Long fallen wide."
