Grand 'Canyon'

McGuane offers majestic story collection

Pete Warzel, Special to the News

Published July 14, 2006 at midnight

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It's difficult to understand, or accept, that Gallatin Canyon is Thomas McGuane's 14th book. His writing is a timeline in baby boomers' lives, beginning in 1968 with The Sporting Club, where a young McGuane satirized a degenerating America during the Vietnam War, and flowing, sporadically, to this latest collection of new stories where a mature McGuane details the complex relationships of daily life. We are aging together - and in his case, I might say gracefully.

McGuane has trained to be a more patient, long distance writer after the exhausting sprints of his early work. The danger of burnouts when McGuane lived hard and wrote frantically in the '70s, in the mad, prolific dashes of his National Book Award-nominated Ninety-Two in the Shade and the screenplay for Rancho Deluxe, have settled down into a sustainable rhythm of his last novels, his elegant essays on hunting and fishing in An Outside Chance, and here, in this vivid collection of short fiction. Some of the stories were previously published in The New Yorker, but they work better in this group of 10 that thread themes in and out of each tale, binding the book together with his precise writing.

The heart of the collection is found in the ranching country of western Montana where men and women (and McGuane himself), surrounded by the nearby silhouettes of mountain ranges and the cyclical forces of weather, work the land and toil at the difficult relationships with neighbors, friends and lovers. The stories are snapshots of those relationships and the bewilderment inherent in them. In the story Cowboy, a man interviews for a job on a ranch that is owned by an odd couple, brother and sister - " 'Maybe he can tell us what good he is.' I says, 'I'm a cowboy.' " That's a man who knows precisely who he is but doesn't necessarily know where or how he fits with the rest of the world.

Each story addresses that issue. A high school kid tries to find stature in the face of an intimidating drum major from the football marching band, and finds it alone on the ice of frozen Lake Erie. Another boy watches the interplay of his favorite eccentric uncle and his father at the tense, extended family dinner following the death of his grandmother. At the family reunion, the boy pieces together clues from the past and comes to realizations about the friction between his mother and father, with his uncle, unknowingly, acting as catalyst. As his father leaves and he stays with his mother, he is mature enough to realize he has taken sides in his life and is comfortable with his allegiance.

In another story, a retired lawyer from Boston moves back home to Montana and finds his grandchildren foreign to him, his daughter bitter and his paralyzed son-in-law making a stand the only way he can. They are all looking for place - in the land, in family, in life. Some find it and in the process a kind of redemption. Some do not.

Every story has an edge to it that has become a trademark of McGuane's writing. He can put down lyrical prose and set the tone for a heartwarming story that turns abruptly and shatters the placid landscape it is set within.

All the stories are skillful, some exceptional. But the piece titled The Refugee stands for them all and takes off into a realm that sings rather than tells. It is mythic in scope, not unlike Hemingway's Old Man and the Sea, both taking place on the mystical waters off of Key West and Cuba, both involving men looking for redemption and their place in a society inherited from powers bigger than they can imagine.

The Refugee is a very long story, bordering in depth on that most elusively defined of literary forms - the novella. Errol Healy is on a mission, perhaps his last, to find the anchor in his life, or former life - an old woman in Key West who, in the hippie days of the '70s, poured out wisdom and grace to the wayward children who found Land's End a sour kind of paradise. The action of the story involves a journey to her by boat across the Gulf of Mexico. Errol is a drunk and knows it well, loathes it to the core of his being. His hope is that Florence will center him and give him the option of drinking no more.

When he finally makes it to Key West, Florence appears as a ghostly apparition. All of McGuane's characters need to know forgiveness, all strive to be forgiven. But Florence is senile now, and that ability has long gone, so Errol is left to find redemption on his own, and promptly gets drunk in the process.

He leaves Key West unconscious after a final binge, and the sea takes on its mythic persona: "A bad storm was coming and he meant to embrace it. The first passage would be fear, but the other side - if he could get there - was what interested him as being the country of death or freedom, unless it turned out they were the same thing."

They are not the same, and the land he reaches after a mighty battle with the sea will delight you as McGuane again hones the edge of his story and takes readers to a place they could not have imagined they would enter in these pages. A wry wit takes hold, and with the irony of the last page the work has become a parable of re-creation.

The Refugee is powerful stuff, and as the second-to-last piece in the book it sets up the last, the title story Gallatin Canyon, as a letdown. It is, however, little disappointment in an overall work that delights, surprises and gives a sense of what well-wrought language can do.

Saul Bellow once called McGuane a "language star," and he still wears that mantle well. The younger, wilder McGuane, dubbed "Captain Berserko" in his driven days of the '70s, is nowhere to be found in this elegant work. He is completely in control and writes with heart, one we all have tried to summon at times in our own lives, especially as we grow older together.

Pete Warzel is a freelance writer whose reviews have appeared in Southwest Book Views, Inside/Outside Magazine and the American Book Review. He lives in Denver.

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