While Proulx's incorporation of family history and the story of the Native Americans who inhabited her property long before Europeans journeyed to America is insightful and interesting, her hyper-neurotic tendencies concerning the design and decoration of her new home reveal her to be something of a batty social climber who is more concerned with the color of the floor in her kitchen than most anything else. Bird Cloud ends with a nice bit of bird-watching narrative, but otherwise is kind of a throw away book.

Notes:

Proulx's comfortable, relaxed memoir style is at contrast with her taut fiction, and it makes her brief family history all the more readable. Proulx's vision is luxurious and unabashedly grand for a writer of fiction. It's a little self-important of Proulx to think we care about her house's mechanical room or any of a myriad other minor details. The lengthy description of Proulx's taste in interiors becomes a defense of her low French-Canadian birth, as if she's creating her own high-birth classiness, a taste you can not earn. Proulx finds a great amount of history in Bird Cloud, through researching land ownership. We should all know this much about the places we inhabit.

Her cataloging of the Native American past of her property is passionate, if a bit hypocritical considering her ownership of such a huge tract of formerly Indian land. Is she much better than the ranchers who stole the land in the first place? Proulx ends with a year in the bird life at Bird Cloud, the most sane and human project of the book, which is filled with meaningless neurotic ramblings.