The Cadence of Grass

Set in the heartland of Montana, McGuane’s novel is a snappy and energetic story of a family trying to come to terms with the perverse last will and testament of their patriarch, the awful Sunny Jim Whitelaw.

The Whitelaw bottling plant is heading downhill fast, but Jim has stipulated that the family may only sell the business if his daughter Evelyn calls off her divorce from the odious Paul. The man in question returns to town to claim his inheritance (and cheat on his estranged wife with her sister Natalie, whose own marriage to the docile Stuart is in its last throes), but somehow you know it’s not all going to go his way.

McGuane is a very funny writer, and he conjures up these (mostly) awful – and certainly dysfunctional – people with the minimum of physical description. The peppy and venomous dialogue, which crackles like static between the protagonists, tells you all you need to know about them. A secondary cast of characters is also deftly sketched.

What makes this more than just another novel about middle-class Americans going to pot is the setting. Montana is a wild and vast state, its inhabitants traditionally tied to the land, raising cattle and horses, and growing alfalfa. As with most things agricultural, however, the ranchers’ way of life has become less viable, and McGuane – you can tell – is fed up about it. He reserves his most descriptive prose for the stubborn nobility of these people, the animals they care for, and the bleakness of the winter weather that engulfs them.

McGuane is a writer in full control of his powers; he wrote one of the funniest and, in my opinion, best American novels of the 1990s (Nothing But Blue Skies, unfortunately out of print), and his confidence is clear for all to see in The Cadence of Grass, especially in its unexpected and moving final pages. In fact, just about the only thing I don’t like about this book is its title, which doesn’t quite conjure up the raging energy of McGuane’s writing.