Keep the Change

Another novel dealing with people estranged from family, home and themselves. This novel is heartening in that the characters sometimes find the courage to try to transcend their normal mode of existence. Success is by no means a given, but that makes things all the more compelling and heartening. McGuane's dialogue always delights.

While Montana is cast as "the last best place" by many of its writers, McGuane seems to see the place as a land of lost hope and illusion. Knee deep in ironies, the story turns in many ways on a faded painting in an abandoned ranch house that Joe, the main character, remembers from boyhood. Grown up now and a painter himself, who doesn't paint anymore, he abandons a Cuban girlfriend in Florida and fetches up after a cross country drive at the old home ranch to spend a season fattening cattle for market while having no faith that much of anything will happen to give his life any direction or purpose. While most of this story takes place in Montana and most of its characters are nominally Montanans, they seem unmoored not only to the land but to any reason for being there. Those who come from elsewhere tire of it and leave. Those who would leave can't. Only a land-hungry rancher Overstreet seems to have a purpose in life, and it's clearly an empty one - buying up more land. An old girlfriend figures in the story, and her jealous husband, and there are family members who are able to betray each other, and do. The relations between men and women swing wildly between romance and erotic encounters to bitterness. Greed lurks darkly everywhere. It's a vision not unlike the one in Larry McMurtry's "Texasville." His Duane is a distant cousin of Joe, and it's easy to imagine Jeff Bridges in a movie version of the story - beleaguered and wryly puzzled by what's become of his life. I recommend this novel to anyone ready for an anti-romance about the West, which questions - often humorously and outrageously - most of what the West has stood for in the American imagination.

"Thomas McGuane lives here" I was told last year during a Montana visit. "Who cares?" say I, never having heard of him. Oh, how I wish I had known, wish I had read this wonderful book and taken the time to visit Mr. McGuane and thank him for wonderful vacation reading a year later. Raced through this book; raced back to the bookstore for "Some Horses", embarked on "An Outside Chance" and contemplated sending Mr. McGuana a fan letter! Seldom does a book make me laugh out loud and have to put it down until I recover. This book is delightful and you wonder how anyone can possibly think up a story like this.