The cover of A Wooded Shore is a photograph of a white cabin cruiser powering across smooth water with a single figure standing at the stern. It’s a beautiful day, but something is wrong. The bow is cut off, and the color is washed out, faded, with something sad about it, like an old family Polaroid you recognize but can’t quite place. Then it hits you. In every one of these Thomas McGuane stories, something is going to be very wrong and yet probably hilarious—existential slapstick in ventriloquial voices with such precise language and restraint that his sentences will literally shine up off the page.
In “Wide Spot,” the first story in A Wooded Shore, the nameless narrator explains how his “‘home life never worked out. First wife was a paralegal named Sue who left me for an RV dealer. The second wife was a big-busted Broken Arrow buckle bunny. Bomb-grade sex drive, pour-in Wranglers. Her boyfriend lost everything at the bucking-horse sale and stranded her in the Range Riders Bar.… That marriage was longer than the first one by seven hundred and nineteen days and all I got was debt.’ I thought this was a stylish summary, and it seemed to break the ice with Micah.”
The narrator is a small-time politician revisiting Prairiedale (once known as Wide Spot, for obvious reasons), where some decades previously he played in a band called the Daft led by Micah. Now, as an incumbent state representative, our protagonist is “to some extent mortified to even have the job. Getting along by going along is what got us all here; as my dad, an alcoholic dentist, used to say about staring into dirty mouths, ‘It’s a living.’”
Not so for Micah, who actually had talent and character but settled into Wide Spot with a girl he got pregnant the night of a concert. He’s weathered into a working-class hero with an extraordinarily beautiful daughter named Maybellene (under “that old music spell”) he raised alone after the early death of his wife. Our narrating politician leers at an entrancing photograph of the girl during an embarrassing reunion and then drives immediately to Lewistown, where Maybellene lives. He considers stalking her “for a sustained look-see” but calls instead, asking to come over. She says she’ll think about it and call him back, but it’s Micah who makes that call.
“I just got a call from Maybellene,” Micah tells the politician. “Says you called, says you’re in town.”
“Well, sure, yes. More of a courtesy call than anything.”
“Tell you what. If you can stay there for a couple of hours I’ll come over and kill you.”
In “Balloons,” a wiseass doctor enjoys an affair with Joan, the wife of real estate agent Roger. “Joan made it clear, at the beginning of our affair, that this was not her first rodeo. She added, ‘I don’t do it to get anywhere.’ That was all the justification we needed. I thought of Benjamin Franklin’s obscure dictum about ‘using venery,’ and was reassured that our girl Joan was more ethical than that early American icon.”
The doctor finds “several ways of viewing Roger; the nicest one credited him with enthusiasm and bonhomie, and this really was more helpful than, say, applying the standards used in one of Hemingway’s café scenes, where the queries were all about who was or wasn’t a phony. When Joan, Roger, and I sat down together, we were, strictly speaking, three phonies. There were a good many non-phonies scattered around the dining room. They looked rather dull.” Roger gets wise to the affair and tells our doctor-narrator about a school assignment to write an essay about one of Dante’s circles of hell. “‘I picked the Sea of Excrement.’ He smiled. ‘I’m a realist, you see.’” Years later, the now-down-and-out Roger comes to him for an assisted suicide and, well, you can’t make this stuff up—unless you’re Thomas McGuane.
Over six short-story collections, ten novels, six books of essays, five movies, and numerous pieces of journalism, McGuane has defined the so-called “New West” without ever using the term. In his 1975 Rancho Deluxe screenplay, the reluctant cowboy Harry Dean Stanton has to “hoover the Navajos” (vacuum carpets) as part of his ranch-hand job. Now, in his story “Retail,” Roy, an unlikely success as an insurance broker “whose guiding principle was suspicion,” suffers from “nondirectional, intense longing, much of which was erotic,” for Dale, who skis patrol in winter and otherwise sells stuff on eBay (“It was as though she had a store in outer space”) while she waits out probate on the estate of her recently dead husband, an elderly Episcopalian doctor whose last words were “What’s going on here?”
That’s Roy and Dale in the New West and a long yippee-yi-yo-ki-yay from Roy Rogers riding the range with cowgirl Dale Evans. Could McGuane be fooling around here? What if “the mountains [were] hovering like pool toys” and, as another character explains: “I got to where I smelled bad to myself and on one of my binges, I followed a Hyundai into a car wash and got drove off by the owner of the car with the soap wand.” That’s the thing about all of these stories, especially the ones set, say, in a “prairie town, where the future of the post office was under review and the landowners lived elsewhere,” maybe where locals “think they’re country when all they are is rural.” McGuane chooses words carefully, and knowing he’s not kidding helps every word seem perfect. Better than any other writer, he knows the territory.
“Crazy About a Mercury” follows a hot-rod enthusiast who built barbed-wire fences in Iraq on a civilian contract, wound up with a lifelike tattoo of a fly on the end of his nose, and now inspects nursing homes for code infractions. The love of his life is Coral—a big girl who “uses her beauty like a weapon” and “grew up above a diesel shop run by her father and brother, brutes in greasy coveralls.” Coral dislikes the narrator’s name—Clark—and calls him Clyde. Coral’s a physician’s assistant now, but Clyde thinks there were maybe times in her life when she was desperate. “Whoa, that makes two of us.” They were married in Elko, Nevada, by an Elvis impersonator, who sang a “penetrating baritone version of that country classic ‘I’m My Own Grandpa.’” Coral had to explain to Clyde “that the Elvis impersonator was actually a lady. ‘What a town.’”
When McGuane moved to Montana in 1968, he said it was because he didn’t want his sporting life to be expeditionary, which meant he wanted fishing and hunting in his own backyard. Livingston was perfect, a railroad and ranching town on the Yellowstone River by the bottom of Paradise Valley—a tough but friendly place where the locals were not yet cynical. Writing and fishing friends followed, with McGuane as de facto gatekeeper, and Paradise Valley was increasingly visible as a creative hideout. If you were a writer from Montana, or just connected there, you somehow earned immediate status in both New York and L.A. Montana was suddenly a literary force field with Hollywood connections—Jeff Bridges, Peter Fonda, Sam Peckinpah, and William Hjortsberg, to name a few—doubling back on themselves, with celebrity overload on the horizon, and it was all McGuane’s fault.
Saul Bellow described him as “a language star,” but McGuane sometimes explained himself by saying he didn’t want to have “writer hands”—a slap at his MFA (playwriting) from Yale and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship to Stanford. He was famously wild and handsome, with beautiful women and plenty of money. Friends would joke that if Tom were broke and stumbling around some fallow sugarcane field like the bums did in Florida, he’d probably fall and hit his head on a priceless conquistador breastplate. An affair with the actress Elizabeth Ashley turned his life into tabloid fodder, and then he was suddenly with Margot Kidder, who would soon play Lois Lane in Superman. A peculiarly engaging 1978 profile in Esquire described him as a kind of literary leader of the Lost Boys, marveling at both the chaos and charisma that followed him: “McGuane’s Game: This crazy life that novelist Thomas McGuane has been living—is it a dream? Or a nightmare?”
“How do you find out what’s enough until you find out what’s too much?” McGuane explained in All That Is Sacred, a 2023 follow-up to a 1973 documentary called Tarpon, about his innovative fly-fishing on the flats around Key West and attendant drug-fueled carousing in the late 1960s and early ’70s—references to which inform all nine of the stories in A Wooded Shore.
Like his 2018 comprehensive story collection, Cloudbursts: Collected and New Stories, A Wooded Shore is about Montana the way Dubliners is about Ireland—that is, about nothing less than the human condition and, especially in McGuane’s hands, the strangeness in the ways lives turn out. “Not Here You Don’t” is relentlessly funny even as it is about loss, depression, and rattlesnakes. In “Thataway,” he zigzags through offbeat plots with surgical language, tracing the branching storylines of an elderly woman’s death and the fallout on her family, especially her sister who has never left their impoverished town, and her brother, a marginal cowboy actor turned furniture-store tycoon who is forced to return to his hometown by his investigative filmmaker daughter.
In “Take Half, Leave Half,” McGuane writes cowboy better than anyone, ever. Grant and Rufus are riding roundup. Grant thinks he sees “a line of Brangus yearlings on the farthest, highest ridge” and tells Rufus: “I think they made us.”
“So what? Never was a cow could outrun a horse. We got them trapped between two oceans.”
Rufus was raised in “a chaos of poverty, malaise, and unforeseen childbearing” but is both of great heart and beautiful young-man instinct and magnetism. “Unfortunately, I still carry a torch for Alva, despite her preference for that sorry redheaded dog. I met her when I was delivering oxygen. I stopped by to pick up the equipment after her dad died. She was so beautiful I told her how much I wanted her. She pointed to the couch and said, ‘Over there okay?’”
In syncopation with freewheeling Rufus, Grant’s sensitivity unfolds when, as early teenagers, the two friends float down a small river. “At the first ranch they slipped through there was a yard light above the haymow, so they could see old man Bror Edison, who claimed he’d invented electricity back when there were few people around to say he hadn’t, sitting with his wife, Gladys, tiny elders holding hands, drinking beer, and idly waving the bugs away. The boys were close to them as they floated past and felt something ineffable that kept them from speaking. Grant would remember that scene a year or two later when his father told him that Edison had parked his flivver on the tracks of what many still called the Great Northern, ‘and kissed all them doctor bills goodbye.’ Edison was uncharitably criticized for parking in such a way that Gladys’s side would be struck first. ‘Bror was a detail man,’ Grant’s father said. ‘He invented electricity.’”
At novella length, the title story, “A Wooded Shore,” makes up more than a quarter of the book and is unique in that it draws on McGuane’s Great Lakes roots. It is also quieter, darker, launching on “a small white cabin cruiser of uncertain vintage as it pushes its way up a small tributary of a great lake whose slow current glistens between low banks.” There are houses along the river, some cared for, others neglected. “Newer, more suburban settlers enjoyed the messy homes of the poor and their suggestion of picturesque early days or merely enduring shiftlessness, reassuring in agitated times.” No sophisticated reader will get a couple of pages into it without a chill or finish without recognition of how things can go horribly wrong for all the right people. Publishers Weekly calls it a “potent decades-spanning chronicle of a family’s decline,” which is surprisingly on the nose.
“It has been a long road and where did everyone go?” McGuane wrote me in an email, referring to Jim Harrison, Russell Chatham, and Guy de la Valdène—recently departed longtime friends who, along with McGuane’s brother-in-law Jimmy Buffett, were at the center of All That Is Sacred. He told me he had a new book coming, and that the idea of doing another one was “repugnant.” Whoa! But at 86, married to Laurie Buffett for 48 years, living one watershed over from Livingston on an immaculate ranch in the Boulder River valley in Sweet Grass County, he went on to say, “Laurie and I are having the best days of our lives” and implied that renewed energy was on the way in his writing.
Beginning in the 1970s, I edited dozens of McGuane pieces at a number of magazines, mostly just hooking paragraphs and admiring his tight control of language, humor, and what one critic called his mastery of “macho angst,” whatever that was. He enjoyed “long reaches” like the one between being nominated for a National Book Award (Ninety-two in the Shade) and winning the team roping (“I like to get a leetle loaded and rope horned cattle”) at the small local rodeo in Gardiner the same year (1974). This time, opening the digital galley, like every time I opened one of his pieces, or stories, or emails even, there was the excitement that I was in for something special, except that now his long reach is anchored by this further proof that there is no better writer than Thomas McGuane.•
Terry McDonell has published widely as a journalist, top-edited a number of magazines, and was elected to the American Society of Magazine Editors Hall of Fame in 2012. He is president emeritus of the Paris Review Foundation and most recently cofounded Literary Hub.
