The Cadence of Grass

Becoming UnbottledTHE CADENCE OF GRASS moves through the lives of the Whitelaw family who own a bottling company in Montana. After the death of the patriarch, Sunny Jim (who never smiled), the lives of the rest of the family shift as unpredictably as prairie grass in the wind. The uneven beat of the action and the jarring, Kafkaesque characters contribute to the uniqueness of the book. The characters are both weirder than life yet touchingly real, and McGuane is often laugh-out-loud funny. Stuart, the disparaged and underestimated son-in-law is described as "simple enough to hide his own Easter eggs."For a person who has been on a horse three times in her life and who has stood in a working barn once for five minutes (phew) the descriptions of such are a delight. I loved reading about draft horse stanchions, snaffles, Kelly Brothers grazers, offside billet straps and coppermouth John Israels, even though I have only the haziest idea as to what they are. And reading how Evelyn maneuvers her pony to work the cattle is as good as watching a gold medal figure skater.McGuane is a first rate writer, a keen observer of humankind, and lover of the Montana country. THE CADENCE OF GRASS: a memorable read.

I first discovered Thomas McGuane in a Paris Review interview in 1985. He is a man of eloquence of the type that answers to questions posed to him about his writing were so fascinating that I began immediately reading his entire body of work. So cherished are these novels in my cannon that I did not read them one right after another, but spread them out over years to properly savor each one. I would read Nobody's Angel, and delight in reliving it for a time, referring to it, quoting it, then when a year or so had passed, I read Panama, Bushwhacked Piano, Ninety-two In the Shade, etc., until I reached the point at which I was ready to read whatever new book came out. In 1992 McGuane turned away from the usual cast of kooky loners and boot-clad bon vivants and wrote about a family man, and his family, in Nothing But Blue Skies. This was a new step for a man who knew how to enjoy and savor the wilder side of life, but also was able to use dinstinct technical language in an entertaining way to describe cutting horses, fly fishing, or sundry ranching, as well as metaphorically tying the changes of the modern west into the changes of modern westerners, casting sentences and forging paragraphs that stand with the greatest of American literature. In The Cadence of Grass, McGuane shows another step in his growth and finally, much to his chagrin, and despite all his attempts to demand otherwise, he shows us that age has brought him wisdom, as well as contemplation of mortality.Is this his novel about death? No, death was dealt with face-to-face in Nobody's Angel, McGuane's cathartic wrestling with his sister's death in real life. The Cadence of Grass is about the events leading up to death. That we all die is of course a given, and although a patriarch's death is the McGuffin for this story, it is the events that lead up to and directly lead to death that he deals with for the first time in his writing. Until now, there was always a pervasive sense of immortality in McGuane's characters, even when some of them died. Cadence takes us up close to the events, and even the moments, that precede death, including the acknowledgement of those about to die that they are living those preceding moments. McGuane exposes his own vulnerability, his own personal weaknesses through his characters in this book, and one gets the feeling that unlike other of his novels, in which his feelings usually occupy only one character, in Cadence he spread out his feelings among all the characters, perhaps as a way of making the expression of those feelings less burdensome. I feel that if he graced one character with all this contemplation it would have made the character too intense and maudlin to let the story breathe. As it is, McGuane keeps honed his clever, sometimes cryptic dialogue and hilarious descriptive powers, but lets more of the weaknesses of humanity come through and rather than using them for comic effect, he sympathizes with those who show weakness and

Witty, wonderful,whimsical,wicked and wise. This is by far McGuane's best work ever. I laughed and was unable to put thisbook down. This will be a best seller soon! Loved it!...

McGuane is my favorite novelist, mining territory that hits uncomfortably close to my own ranching, adulterous bones. Setting aside Larry McMurtry's dissipated and puzzling "review" of this book in a recent NY Review of Books, this is one of McGuane's more problematic novels. It is also his most interesting work in 12 years. It does not rival his best (Nobody's Angel) in either grim power or wit. Nevertheless, all the familiar ingredients are there - New West profiteers, doomed marriages, snowstorms on the Absarokas, suicides, revenge, the dead father figure with the endless shadow, and the tiring intra-family struggle for power with a capital "P." Maybe because these ingredients are ever-present we are starting to take McGuane's bleak elegance for granted.The novel sputters a bit in the thoroughly rendered but self-indulgent hardcore cowboy scenes where the dignified old hand culls sick cows and tends to the calfing and generally displays a wealth of ranching motherwit that the average reader will find indecipherable. Hell, I run cattle and I found it distracting! What more than makes up for it are the razor-sharp exchanges between the characters and the sharply drawn quiet moments that fill the book.My Uncle Wade loved this book. Not that my Uncle Wade is particularly well-read - and when I was a kid he took me to the Wyoming - Colorado State game and made me wet myself at the Circle K as a distraction to the clerk while he shoplifted beef jerky and tobacco. But my Uncle Wade knows Western Gothic. For my own self, I will just say that if you've ever spent a few fevered hours with your brother's wife at a Super 8, inoculated livestock on a Friday night, or hit someone with a pool cue, you will like this book.

This very original book invites us to compare two versions of the West, one arriving and one departing. Its story of crumbling families and twisted estate planning is universal. This book is very hard to put down, and its conclusion will leave readers deep in thought for a long time.