Although there are hucksters, dreamers and long-shot dice-rollers sprinkled up and down the Eastern seaboard, people who really want a fresh start in America go west. For the past 37 years, Thomas McGuane has been showing how this mythology calls like a siren song to Americans. Panama brought us the tale of drugged-up celebrity, reflecting on his years of decadence, while Keep the Change imagined a struggling artist washing up on a Montana ranch.
Like this hero, McGuane too has been shaped and molded by his years in Montana. The longer he has remained in Big Sky Country, the cleaner, the steelier his prose has become—as if the prairie wind has sanded it down.
Gallatin Canyon, McGuane's latest collection of stories, features some of his most elegantly varnished work yet. Like the Irish novelist William Trevor, McGuane has folded, twisted, and crammed entire family histories into these stories. And yet if you placed any one of them in a wind tunnel, their drag efficient would still be quite low.
The heroes of these stories are no one special—retirees or near-retirees trying to keep a low profile, yet still affected by the slippage of lust or greed, sometimes loneliness.
"Vicious Circle" tells the tale of a middle-age man who picks up a younger woman at a bar and winds up with more than he bargained for. In "Old Friends," an attorney's risky-living college roommate turns up on his doorstep with the law at his heels. He briefly shelters the man from the police, then realizes he's way too old for such shenanigans.
Although each story bears McGuane's lean muscularity, its deeply masculine cadences, there is a pleasing variety of perspectives here. "Cowboy" unfolds in the voice of a ranch hand trying to make a fresh go of things on a ranch owned by a brother and sister team. "Both of them was heavy smokers," the man notes, "to where a oxygen bottle was in sight. So they joined a Smoke-Enders deal the Lutherans had, and this required em to put all their butts in a jar around their neck on a string. The old sumbitch liked this okay because he could just tap his ash right under his chin."
Like Annie Proulx, McGuane has found a way to write about simple, hard-working people without his slapstick ever turning into condescension. Through them he also registers his irritation with the changes in the Montana landscape. In "Aliens," a 75-year-old lawyer indulges a lifelong dream "and returned to live in the West," only to discover "Montana seemed like a place he had once read about in a dentist's office." The book's title story includes a long riff about the way tourists have made the place dangerous.
"This combination of cumbersome commercial traffic and impatient private cars was a lethal mixture that kept our canyon in the papers, as it regularly spat out corpses. In my rear-view mirror, I could see a line behind me that was just as long as one ahead, stretching back, thinning, and vanishing around a green bend. There was no passing lane for several miles. A single amorous elk could have turned us all into twisted, smoking metal."
That "amorous elk" is pure McGuane—comedy often occurring at the nexus of human folly and the natural world. Reading these stories, you get the sense that McGuane shares the sentiments of a character in "Miracle Boy," which recounts the death of an Irish matriarch and the chaos it spreads across a wide Michigan family.
"You'll find this outfit," the man says to his son, "in street shoes." In other words, people who have cut themselves off from the natural world are not to be trusted; they are, in a way, unnatural.
From birth we contain the secret of our demises, and in Gallatin Canyon McGuane tells about characters struggling with that knowledge. In "North Coast," two youngish heroin users track down an Indian relic in the Pacific Northwest—risking mauling by a bear in order to get the money for a year of drug use. "He kept his eyes on the lighted swatch of huckleberries near their path and saw the moving furrow in the bushes," McGuane writes of his impertinently brave hero, "but an encounter never came." But this luck, these stories powerfully remind us, eventually runs out.