Fiction's Fourth Estate

Thomas McGuane’s Newest Collection, “Gallatin Canyon”

By Allen M. Jones, 7-09-06

Editor's Note: Click here to read Hal Herring's interview with McGuane on New West.

By and large, there are three sorts of writers: The misfortunates who have sacrificed everything for their art (the Lowrys of the world, the Sextons); the mean average (with their bitter stories about publicists); and the fortunate few for whom, when a deck of cards is tossed high, all the aces flop face up (Foer, Franzen).

But maybe there's a fourth category as well. I’m thinking now about those famous writers who have nevertheless not done as well as they perhaps deserve. Up here in Montana, you read Thomas McGuane and you can't help but feel a dose of indignation on the author's behalf. As successful as he is, it still feels like there should be more. Where are the major awards, for instance? His is a career that's been built on essays (An Outside Chance, Some Horses), a few screenplays (Rancho Deluxe, The Missouri Breaks, Tom Horn), and a portfolio of fictions that, taken together (Panama, Nobody's Angel, Nothing but Blue Sky), float him up into the most rarefied kind of literary air. Surely he's due another ace or two. There are so few American writers who can make you laugh even as they're breaking your heart.

Maybe it's time. His newest book, a collection of ten short stories called Gallatin Canyon, contains moments nearly as fine as anything he has written, and if there are soft spots, they serve only to emphasize the soundness of the larger whole. Coming right out of the gate, the story "Vicious Circle," provides enough dry humor to make it feel like a kind of coming home. Ah yes, McGuane again. The guy is simply incapable of writing a dull line of dialogue. At a wedding in which his protagonist, Briggs, is wrongly assumed to have slept with the alcoholic, unattractive bride, the scene goes like this:

When he put the glass down and turned around, he was looking into the face of the groom, aggressively close to his own. He stared at Briggs in silence. "I hope you understand that you will never put your nasty hands on her again," he said. "Get over it."
Briggs looked at this handsome, well-cared-for man. "It will be hard to give up," Briggs said.
"But you will, won't you?"
"I suppose. It was so intense, the last time, in my car, the air bags deployed. But, yes, you have my word."
The groom reached out his hand and Briggs took it. The hand was so clammy that Briggs had an instant of sympathy.

Athletic sex to alcoholism to pathos and sympathy. Just add water and it’s instant McGuane.

Typically, his protagonists are beset. But by whom, by what? In a word, modernity. The human condition. Their own failings (illicit chemicals, jilted women) and senses of alienation. Despite their best efforts, the world keeps running off and leaving them. It's impossible to resist a sense of identification. In his story, "The Refugee," about a booze hound out looking for a new kind of cure, he writes, "A frigate bird followed him at a great altitude, a perfect flyer that barely needed to move its wings, an elegant black zigzag watching his wake for bait fish. He daydreamed about what it would be like to be a bird like that, a seabird with that great altitude and horizon. No big thoughts, of course, just 'Where's the fish?' Like being a fine athlete, everything vision and muscle memory, Ted Williams watching the ball compress on the bat, no attitude, a simple there-it-is. Roar of the crowd same as wind or traffic, just worthless noise. If I were a bird, that six-pack wouldn't glow like radium, a screeching come-hither."

Whom among us, drinkers or not, fails to recognize this futile hankering after larger horizons? Pity thrums inside like a good bass note struck hard.

You read McGuane for the dialogue, for the empathy, but you also read him because by God he knows some things. In the brilliant little compressed jewel of a narrative, "Cowboy," he takes less than twelve pages to perfectly capture the desolate, work-hardened life of a ranchhand. His hero has signed on as a cowboy at a hardscrabble little outfit run by an aging brother and sister. "We rode through the cattle pretty near ever day, year round, and he come to trust me enough to show how his breedin program went, with culls and breedbacks and outcrosses and replacements, and he took me to bull sales and showed me what to expect in a bull and which ones was correct and which was sorry." One hundred and fifty pages later, this same author is describing what it feels like to sail alone through a gulf coast hurricane. "He replaced the reefed main with a storm trysail, now the only sail on the boat. He'd thought that the double-reefed main would be good enough but it wasn't. If it had loaded up with seawater, it would have been big enough to take out the mast. Amid gusts that sounded like gunshots, he sheeted the trysail to leeward, lashed the tiller in the opposite direction, and produced a plausible version of heaving to." In that ten thousand mile wide stretch between sailing and cattle breeding, between outcrosses and trysails, that's where McGuane has staked out his territory.

It’s a level of authority that also extends into more complicated realms. He knows the vocabulary of sailing, sure, but he also knows the intricately knotted webs tied between lovers, family members, college pals. In a story simply titled, "Old Friends," he considers the obligations and limits of a shared history. "Briggs's friendship with Faucher had been long and intermittent. Arbitrarily assigned as roommates at the boarding school they'd attended before Yale, they had become lifelong friends without ever getting over the fact that their discomfort with each other occasionally boiled over into detestation." Later, along the same theme, he writes, "Against these decades of loyalty, they seemed to search for an unforgivable trait in each other that would relieve them of this abhorrent, possibly lifelong burden. But now they had years of continuity to contend with, and it was harder and harder to visualize a liberating offense." This particular story, perhaps the strongest in the collection, ends badly for the friendship, triggering a nameless guilt over the fact that there is always more to be done.

As seldom as he's written in the short story form, McGuane seems to feel at home here. He has a way of quickly sketching out his characters that make them immediately familiar. In "Aliens," a tough but artful consideration of the different flavors of cruelty (the cruelty of the young to the old, of husbands to wives, of xenophobic locals to outsiders), he begins by saying, "Homer Newland, a partner and franchise specialist at a Boston law firm, had had a distinguished career and a very long one before retiring at seventy-five, when he was certainly still useful but had become more aware of the frequent need, when meeting new clients, of demonstrating that he still had all his marbles. So he indulged a lifelong dream and returned to live in the West, where he'd grown up but which in his long absence had made the place of his nativity hard to grasp." We all know this old man; we all can't help but follow him through McGuane's idiosyncratic plot points, the slings and arrows that make up his distinctive fiction. In this case, we have an awkward, late-age love affair gone wrong and a paraplegic jilted husband arguing for possession of his old empty whiskey bottles, including a "phone decanter." The husband said, "I emptied that phone last New Year's Eve. Cecile was upstairs watching the ball come down on Times Square. When she showed up, do you think she wished me happy New Year? No, she said, 'Shit-faced in a wheelchair is a look whose time will never come.'"

Reading through Thomas McGuane's best work, the inimitable way he marries tragedy and comedy, you're led to understand that the only reasonable response to the absurdity of the modern condition is laughter. There is no real sin in life save that of taking yourself too seriously. In this regard, particularly in the West, McGuane is our patron saint. As the most recent addition to an invaluable body of work, Gallatin Canyon, should ride around on all our dusty, baling twine cluttered dashboards, a talisman to protect us from stuffiness, cynicism, and melancholy.

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