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Summary
Summary
A superb collection of stories--his first in twenty years--from one of our most acclaimed literary figures, whom The New York Times Book Review has called "a writer of the first magnitude."
Place exerts the power of destiny in these ten stories of lives uncannily recognizable and unforgettably strange: a boy makes a surprising discovery skating at night on Lake Michigan; an Irish clan in Massachusetts gather at the bedside of their dying matriarch; a battered survivor of the glory days of Key West washes up on other shores. Several of the stories unfold in Big Sky country, McGuane's signature landscape: a father tries to buy his adult son out of virginity; a convict turned cowhand finds refuge at a ranch in ruination; a couple makes a fateful drive through the perilous gorge of the title story before parting ways. McGuane's people are seekers, beguiled by the land's beauty and myth, compelled by the fantasy of what a locale can offer, forced to reconcile dream and truth.
The stories of Gallatin Canyon are alternately comical, dark, and poignant. Rich in the wit, compassion, and matchless language for which McGuane is celebrated, they are the work of a master.
Author Notes
Thomas McGuane was born in Wyandotte, Michigan on December 11, 1939. He received a B.A. in English from Michigan State University in 1962 and a M.F.A. from Yale University in 1965. His first novel, The Sporting Club, was published in 1969. His other works include Ninety-Two in the Shade, Nothing but Blue Skies, Keep the Change, Panama, and Nobody's Angel. His novel, The Bushwhacked Piano, received the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Award for a Work of Fiction in 1971. He was also co-editor of The Best American Sports Writing. He authored screenplays for Rancho Deluxe (1973), The Missouri Breaks (1976), and 92 in the Shade (1975).
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
McGuane returns to the territories of his novels (Some Horses, etc.) in this collection of stories set in Montana, Michigan and Florida. Most of the characters are older, divorced and still looking for attachment but without much hope of love. They are alcoholics (in "Vicious Circle" and "The Refugee"), junkies ("Northcoast"), low-grade ex-cons ("The Cowboy"), embezzlers ("Old Friends"), disconnected fathers ("The Zombie" and "Aliens") and lackluster ordinary men. In the title story, an unnamed smalltimer sets out on a business trip down the winding Gallatin Canyon, Mont., road with his girlfriend, Louise. He conducts his business dealings with phony bluster and indecision, humiliating himself in the eyes of this woman he hopes to marry; things get worse from there. Any attempts these characters make to draw happiness back into their lives backfires clumsily, pushing it further from their grasp. McGuane's sentences still have a playful quality, but the prevailing dreariness ("I wish I could feel something," exclaims Louise) is something other than inspiring. (July 11) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
A writer renowned for his evocation of the wide-open spaces of the American West (his native Montana in particular) here explores a rewarding range of both geographical and thematic terrain within his second collection (after Nothing But Blue Skies, 1992). Throughout these ten stories of place and displacement by novelist McGuane (The Cadence of Grass, 2002, etc.), geography forges character and character shapes destiny. It's a reflection of his consummate command that his fiction can be simultaneously so funny and so bleak. Whether he's writing in the first or third person (with both narrative approaches prevalent here), his characters contend with minor frustrations and everyday absurdities within lives that just might be pointless, inconsequential beneath the big sky. His settings extend from the West to New England (in both "Aliens" and the concluding title story, the culture clash between Montana and Boston proves crucial) and from the Great Lakes to Key West. As the collection's penultimate story, "The Refugee" is the longest (comprising more than a quarter of the volume's pages) and perhaps the most ambitious, reflecting the mind of a suicidal alcoholic who tries to find some semblance of stability on the sea, attempts to come to terms with his role in the death of a friend who had betrayed him (was it an accident or murder?) and ultimately finds himself both marooned and returned to some sort of Eden. Among the other standouts, "Miracle Boy" conjures the slapstick of mourning within the mysteries of family; "Old Friends" details the inertia of the relationship between life-long friends who have never really liked each other; "Ice" finds a man reminiscing about his Midwestern boyhood, in a coming-of-age story that stirs sexual awakening and intimations of mortality; and the darkly comic "The Zombie" relates the tale of a banker's son determined to retain his virginity and the escort hired by his father to seduce him. Wherever these stories take the reader, the tone is quintessential McGuane. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Gallatin Canyon is a narrow passage along a river in Idaho threaded with a heavily traveled highway. It can be a trap, which is the overarching metaphor in this collection of 10 finely chiseled short stories. McGuane, the author of nine novels, is prized for his uncanny knack for uniting flinty humor (aimed most often at male bewilderment) with classic landscape-inspired American lyricism, and he writes with particular intensity in these initially measured, then increasingly feverish, tales of odd encounters and doomed pairings, of men returning to their roots or heading for the hills. In Ice, a teenager risks his life skating far out onto Lake Ontario in the dark. In The Refugee, a spectacular story destined for a best of volume, a man suicidal with guilt sails the Caribbean, weathering monstrous storms and seeking absolution. Puzzlelike and peopled with cowboys, lawyers, junkies, and drunks, McGuane's virtuoso tales are studies in helplessness and withholding as men try to take control of themselves and their situations and instead are carried along on the great surging current of life, battered by other people's woes, tangled up in their own failings, and enraptured by the earth's grandeur. --Donna Seaman Copyright 2006 Booklist
Library Journal Review
McGuane's reputation is based on his early novels, including The Bushwhacked Piano (1971) and Panama (1978). More recently he has also become an accomplished essayist, but this new collection of stories suggests that short fiction may be his true calling. Most of these tales depict desperate men well past their midlife crises. They have mastered various skills but have little control over their daily lives. In "The Zombie," a prosperous bank president hires a prostitute for his couch potato son, with disastrous results. In "Aliens," a retired Boston lawyer returns home to Montana only to find himself jinxed by family ties. In "The Refugee," an alcoholic veteran of Key West's countercultural Conch Republic seeks redemption. In this story in particular, McGuane fully lives up to the Hemingwayesque tag that is often attached to his name, achieving brilliant effects with nautical jargon. The title story, which first appeared in The New Yorker and later in The Best American Short Stories, 2004, reduces the fabled Big Sky country to a handful of marketing clich?s. This impressive collection will appeal to fans of Robert Stone's book Bear and His Daughter. Highly recommended.-Edward B. St. John, Loyola Law Sch. Lib., Los Angeles (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.