One of our most distinctive short story writers,
Flannery O’Connor, famously opined, “Whenever I’m
asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing
about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize
one.” Her subject was the metaphysical and geographical
American South, its spirit inextricable from its landscape and
history. Similarly, Montana novelist Thomas McGuane’s latest
book, Gallatin Canyon, chronicles the West as it
takes up space inside his characters and suffuses the air around
them, for better and worse.
“All the mean people,
all the open space, seemed to be closing in upon him at
once,” writes McGuane of Homer Newland, an ex-Bostonian who
moves to a romanticized Montana to retire in “Aliens,”
one of the book’s 10 stories. This malevolence too often
partners the beauty of McGuane’s West.
Thomas
McGuane is our Flannery O’Connor of the New West, an expert
on a loneliness distinctive to our region’s altitudes and
seasons, beauty and misery. McGuane knows who we are – not
just natives but transplants — the hikers and dopers, oilmen
and real estate sharks. He knows us with clarity and precision, and
his 14th book casts a certain charity upon even the drunks and
suicides, the ranchette millionaires and petty thieves. His stories
focus on men in lonely places — literally, figuratively or
both — who try to extricate themselves from bleakness.
Whether they succeed depends on will and fate and the measure of
their need for alcohol — or the extent to which alcohol has
mutilated the lives of people they love.
In “Old
Friends,” a former college roommate appears on the
narrator’s Montana doorstep, seeking to evade the law. But
the friend has evolved into an unsympathetic old man: “He was
a vampire coming to life at sundown; with each drink pale flames
arose beneath his skin.”
In the surprising
penultimate story “The Refugee,” the narrator
acknowledges “It had been half his life since he’d
known what hope felt like.” This story packs the heft and
intensity of a novel. Unlike most of the other stories, it is not
set in the geographic West, but it is suffused with the kind of
alienated loneliness pervading Gallatin Canyon.
Its protagonist, Errol Healy, nods to Ernest Hemingway throughout
his perilous, alcohol-drenched passage from Key West to Cuba. Like
Hemingway, McGuane concerns himself with a man’s ability to
survive the harshest consequences of his choices and to survive
them alone. “The Refugee” probes the core of human
fragility and the need for hope. Early on in his voyage east, in a
smooth-sailing moment of sobriety, the narrator writes: “It
occurred to Errol that his drinking days were behind him. Oh, joy!
Not another shit-faced, snockered, plastered, oiled, loaded,
bombed, wasted minute ever again! No more guilt, remorse, rehab or
jail! Free at last!”
Even as we rejoice with Errol,
we know this substance-free moment is tenuous, and time will
shortly see him wasted again. Errol, on a quest for healing, sails
toward Cuba. He remembers the death of his best friend at sea, the
circumstances of which remain hazy to the reader, though what Errol
finds there will shock and strangely soothe him. Redemption is
possible in McGuane’s world, though the reader rarely
foresees the particular form it will take.
“To be
able to recognize a freak, you have to have some conception of the
whole man,” O’Connor continues, “and in the South
the general conception of man is still, in the main,
theological.” In McGuane’s West, it is also spiritual
and at times even blackly humorous. The drunk son-in-law in
“Aliens” falls off a balcony to become a paraplegic,
then runs for mayor, joking about it with his estranged wife, who tells
him, “Shit-faced in a wheelchair is a look whose time will
never come.” But in Gallatin Canyon, it
just might.
The
author writes columns for The Denver
Post’s Colorado Voices series. Her new novel,
Resurrection City: A Novel of Jonestown, will be
published next year.
Gallatin Canyon
Thomas
McGuane
240 pages,
hardcover: $24.
Knopf, 2006.
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Thomas McGuane’s lonely freaks.
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