Gallatin Canyon

A superb new collection of stories by a fine American writer.

Thomas McGuane is a very funny writer, but the almost desperate humour in his stories is leavened by a sense of deep loneliness. Nowhere is this better demonstrated than in his hilarious novel Nothing But Blue Skies (first published in 1993 and out of print in the UK), in which our hero Frank Copenhaver, a Montanan businessman, comes spectacularly off the rails when his wife leaves him.

This tendency for his characters to self-destruct in spite of themselves is most obviously reprised in the title story of Gallatin Canyon, in which a man decides to sabotage a perfectly decent property deal because he might possibly have a better offer hovering in the wings; sense prevails, but this act of lunacy loses him the affection of the woman he thinks he loves. In 'The Refugee' an orchard supervisor (and drunkard), who has never got over the death of his friend in a sailing accident, takes to the sea, only to find himself adrift, literally and emotionally.

Some of the writing evokes childhood fears and uncertainties. 'Miracle Boy' recalls the tensions that ran through an extended but close-knit Irish family in Massachusetts; in Ice a boy gets lost in the dark on a frozen lake.

Others stories are set out West, the heartland of much of McGuane's writing. In his last full-length novel, The Cadence of Grass, McGuane reserved his most descriptive prose for the beautiful but unforgiving landscape and the stubborn nobility of the people working the land and tending animals.

He returns to these themes in Gallatin Canyon: 'Aliens' is the bleak tale of a successful Boston lawyer who heads back to Montana to retire, only to find that he has nothing in common with his daughter; 'Cowboy', told brilliantly in vernacular, is about a convict who turns cowhand for an embittered woman and her brother (the 'sumbitch'), making something of his life before having it taken away from him.

McGuane writes dialogue that crackles; his characters' snappy, acerbic phrases bounce around the page like grenades with their pins out. The number of words uttered may be few, but their significance is great, and this is how these fiery stories come to life.