Knopf
Review by David Starkey
The stories in A Wooded Shore are mostly set in Trump country, but Trump, and politics, are conspicuously absent. We do meet, in “Wide Spot,” a Montana politician, though he claims that “in the great river of American politics, I am no more than a snail darter.” Indeed, he reckons that “like other politicians, big and small, I’m to some extent mortified even to have the job.” That feeling of unworthiness doesn’t quite tally up with the destruction being wreaked on the country and its institutions by one party right now, so there’s something a little off about the fact that the narrator’s big conflict in “Wide Spot” is a confrontation with an old member of his band the Daft. Still, the story is full of comic moments, and it’s clear that McGuane’s intent is to focus on human relationships and the places they occur—his fictional turf just happens to be the reddest of red states.
Once the pivot away from current events was established, I was mostly, and happily, able to ignore the likely voting patterns of McGuane’s fictional demographic and enjoy the misadventures of these eccentric, frequently outrageous, and often unlikeable characters.
Among my favorites anti-heroes and semi-heroes is Cooper in “Thataway,” a furniture outlet kingpin in Southern California who has faithfully ignored his distant and needy sisters in Montana. As the story begins, Cooper’s daughter Bonny is “staying at his place while making an unflattering documentary film about him.” When one of his sisters dies and he must return home, it’s a recipe for family chaos, which McGuane gladly provides.
I’m also partial to the couple in “Crazy About a Mercury.” The narrator, Clyde, is, indeed, crazy about the classic car at the center of his life. He’s married to Coral, a physician’s assistant, who is “big but a she’s a looker and she uses her beauty like a weapon. She said that she is so pretty should could make a bulldog break his chain.” Inevitably, the Mercury causes marital problems, but it’s nothing the indefatigable Coral can’t handle.
Then there’s Roy in “Retail.” Roy has “the unique self-sufficiency of someone raised as a charitable case, a ward of the town, someone whose guiding principle was suspicion.” Naturally, Roy becomes an insurance salesman, one of the most successful in the area, in large measure due to the time he ran into a house and saved a little girl’s cat. Now, however, Roy is infatuated with Dale, who has “the office across the hall from his, where she bought and sold things on eBay, mostly furniture to supplement her seasonal work on the ski patrol.” Her life, like Roy’s is complicated, though she seems to take a special pleasure in leading him on then cutting him off, despite all the blandishments Roy can proffer, including an all-expenses paid trip to Florida.
“Take Half, Leave Half” has a whiff of Cormac McCarthy, if McCarthy hadn’t taken himself so seriously. Two cowboys, Grant and Rufus, drive down from Montana to Oklahoma to work on a cattle ranch for the irascible Coy Blake. Grant is slightly more middle-class in origin, while Rufus comes from a rough and tumble family, but they work well together and have each other’s backs. As in a McCarthy narrative, things don’t end well, but the story’s final sentence reads like a darkly comic punchline, very much in keeping with the book’s overall tone.
One immediately noticeable aspect of these stories is how fast they move. There’s a suggestion of the way James Ellroy crams a narrative into the fewest possible words, but McGuane is more sympathetic to his characters, and he loves describing the details of whatever location they find themselves in, so the prose feels fuller, richer, more engaged.
McGuane’s gift for putting a story into overdrive without skimping on concrete specifics is at its best in the title novella, which concludes the book. The family at the center is composed of two alcoholic parents, Fred and Peggy Latham, and their three children: Mike, the oldest, is also the most pragmatic and well-adjusted, though Fred and Peggy’s poor parenting skills have clearly left their mark; Pete, the middle child, is anxious and fearful and rightly suspects that his mother doesn’t like him much; Bee, the baby of the family, more or less waltzes through early childhood, until she is molested by a teenage boy the careless parents have hired as a babysitter.
The setup sounds grimmer than the actual story, in part because McGuane is clearly having so much fun writing its sentences. Here, for instance, is how the author describes Fred’s departure after his marriage with Peggy, to absolutely no one’s surprise, falls apart: “He packed his drum set, expensive Zildjian hi-hat cymbals, percussion mallet, seven suits, shirts, and ties and moved out, listening to his favorite shows in his car on an old-time radio station. On this painful day, Amos ‘n’ Andy was a welcome consolation. He came back for his shoes.”
Writers their middle-eighties, like McGuane, often have a distinct falling off. It’s nothing to be ashamed of: the brain and body are subject to entropy, like everything else. The fact that A Wooded Shore stands with this author’s finest work is, therefore, a cause for celebration, though it’s maybe better not to ask how McGuane has pulled this magic off. As Coral tells Clyde in “Crazy About a Mercury,” after she’s saved his bacon once again: “Never let ‘em see you sweat. That’s ignorance.”
