Reading Ms. Proulx’s prose is like bouncing along rutted country roads in a pickup truck with no shock absorbers. Her books are packed with arcane flora and fauna and eccentrically named towns and characters. Many writers employ unusual verbs and adjectives; Ms. Proulx likes weird nouns. Her cluttered style is, in a kind of reverse way, as jewel-encrusted as Gustav Klimt’s.

In “Bird Cloud” these qualities turn against her. She visually absorbs Wyoming’s long vistas and spits out data like a seed catalog.

There are three brilliantly researched and written chapters in Bird Cloud that construct a fine gallery interpreting the human and natural history of a wild stretch of Wyoming landscape. Unfortunately, they are the last three chapters and to get to them we have to make it through a meandering, overwrought and badly conceived foyer of “I-built-a-house” memoir, seven chapters long....For the reader, though, it also signals the disappointment of the first two-thirds of her book. We stand at a window Proulx created to provide a certain view, but in looking through it we wonder just what it was she wanted us to see