Listed thus, these qualities sound like negatives, as indeed they often are. If Proulx’s recent collections of Wyoming Stories – Close Range(1999), Bad Dirt (2004), Fine Just the Way It Is (2008) – feature more than a few stories of almost archetypal power, such as ‘The Half-Skinned Steer’ and ‘Brokeback Mountain’, they also include several pieces which, as with ‘The Old Cowboy Songs’, are only stories in the loosest sense; to say nothing of bizarre efforts such as ‘The Sagebrush Kid’, an account of the predations of a carnivorous tree.

Yet they also remind us that expecting Proulx’s fiction to conform to ideas of narrative that ground the notion of story in human volition is misguided. Strip away its restless, often ragged lyricism and one uncovers a sensibility in which human experience is only of interest insofar as it impinges upon her larger concern with the land and the cycles of history that are written into it.

Proulx’s new book, Bird Cloud: A Memoir, suggests a break from the cycle of diminishing returns that has characterised her recent writing. Explicitly non-fictional, rather than offhandedly fictional, it tells the story of how Proulx, at the age of sixty-eight, fell in love with a patch of Wyoming countryside she called Bird Cloud, and her subsequent travails in erecting the house she hoped would be her final home.

The book describes itself as a memoir, but that is only half the story. It is better understood as a meditation on place and on the competing forces of connectedness and rootlessness that define our lives, perhaps not surprisingly, given the disparate threads that Bird Cloud attempts to weave together, it is also an oddly uneven book, its largely undigested gobbets of memoir, family history, and local history giving it something of the gnarled, patchwork quality of Proulx’s most recent novel, That Old Ace in the Hole (2002).

This is not to say that its memoir elements are not successful. Indeed, the book’s opening chapters, which weave together the story of Proulx’s discovery of the land that would become Bird Cloud and an account of the unfortunate history of those who share her name, are its best. They tease out what Jack Kerouac described as ‘that horrible homelessness of all French-Canadians abroad in America’, while subliminally invoking Proulx’s first (and in many ways best) novel, Postcards (1992), by delving into questions of geology.

The highlight of these early chapters is a remarkable account of a trip Proulx took with her sister in the late 1980s. Arriving at the retirement complex in New Hampshire where their mother then lives, the two of them eat a meal cooked by their mother (which, inevitably, reminds them of their childhood), before departing in the late afternoon. Passing through the town they glimpse a shop selling fragments of cloth. Once inside the shop, they are approached by the owner, a man whom Proulx finds inexplicably repellent. They flee, only to stumble upon a horrific car accident on the highway. There is something agitated and uneasy in the telling of this story that only makes sense when, in a subsequent conversation with her mother, Proulx discovers the man she found so repellent was also a Proulx.

Despite its queasy rush, the story seems somehow of a piece with the oddly incantatory recitation of genealogy and geological detail that sur-rounds it. Like the image of the car crash (‘Silence, stillness, all as static as a stage scene’), both are ultimately about a sort of incomprehension, a sense of the randomness and unknowability of human behaviour and the world we inhabit.

There is something appealingly vulnerable about the Proulx revealed in these early chapters: the sense of someone grappling with questions and experiences not easily assimilated, and painfully aware of the cost of ageing. But this version of Proulx quickly gives way to a far less attractive one. It is not just about the house itself, which sounds handsome but grotesquely large, incorporating a sixteen-metre-long library, Japanese soaking baths, and multiple attics and bedrooms, but the curious lack of either literary or personal self-awareness that pervades her litany of complaints about tradesmen and architects.

Of course, the combination of obsession, despair, and fury that underlies her account of the house’s construction will be familiar to anybody who has lived through major renovations. While one might argue that Bird Cloud is really an attempt to subvert the complacency and self-satisfaction of the genre launched by Peter Mayle and Frances Mayes, it owes as much or more to books such as Eat, Pray, Love (2007) and to their depictions of pampered Westerners seeking spiritual fulfilment in the Third World.

Certainly, the Proulx who is revealed in these pages is both privileged and surprisingly grating. Her complaints about ‘stale produce’ from conglomerate stores would not be out of place in one of Maggie Beer’s paeans to the virtues of the simple life, and when Proulx declares, ‘I came back from a wonderful week in Capri’, it is hard not to wince.

Her case is not helped by the triteness of many of the ideas wheeled out. Attempting to draw a comparison between Uluru and Bird Cloud, even Proulx has to concede that the resemblances are ‘perhaps a little far-fetched’, while her views on architects (‘many architects also seem concerned with self-expression as artists’) wouldn’t sound out of place at any middle-class dinner party.

The problem is not the privileged nature of the life Proulx describes, but rather her unwillingness to tease out its contradictions or to step outside her own frame of reference. This is a curious failing in a book that deliberately seeks to ground its exploration of place in an awareness of the depth of time. Even more deeply, it’s about tone. Bird Cloud is a book oppressed by its author’s misanthropy. As becomes increasingly, dishearteningly clear, Proulx’s ill temper is not merely confined to the excrescences of modernity; it is geological and panoptic, a rage at the world which leaves little space or comfort for the reader.

Not even this rage can entirely suppress Proulx’s nervous, edgy lyricism, nor her sense of the ways the land and its cycles extend downwards, through time, connecting us to something mute and irresistible. Nor does it completely obscure either the sense of loss and restlessness that pervades Proulx’s account of her family’s past or the larger awareness of the manner in which place shapes and is shaped by its inhabitants that grounds the book. Yet there is little doubt that it makes Bird Cloud a difficult book to love.

CONTENTS: APRIL 2011