Category: Thomas McGuane

"The Casserole"
by Thomas McGuane
Originally published in the September 10, 2012 issue of The New Yorker.

The New Yorker seems to be in the mood to spoil us. Munro, Boyle, and now McGuane, all great short story writers. This week’s is barely four columns long, so it takes only a moment to read. While I do feel this is one of the more simple stories we’ve had in this bunch, it’s still impressive how much McGuane fits into the short space.

The narrator of “The Casserole” and his wife, Ellie, are just about to celebrate their 25th wedding anniversary. When the story begins, they are waiting for a ferry to help them cross the water to Ellie’s parents’ ranch, where they are planning to celebrate their 25 years.

As I said, it’s a short story, and the basic events are few and rather simple. What makes it worth reading and thinking about is the narrator’s confidence in himself and in his understanding of their marriage. He’s certain that he and his wife are on the same page on a number of subjects. For example, children:

Twenty-five years and no children: her parents had stopped interrogating us about that. They assumed that it was a physical problem that some clinic could solve, but we didn’t want children. We lacked the courage to tell them that. We both liked children; we just didn’t want any ourselves.

And related to the subject of children, who will take over the ranch now that Ellie’s parents are getting too old?

But even if my wife had had siblings she would not have been part of this sort of trouble, as she had never — at least, not since adolescence — wanted to pursue ranch life, rural life, agricultural life. She would have said to a sibling, “Take it! It’s all yours. I’m out of here.” There would have been an element of posturing in this, because she was very attached to the land; she just didn’t want to own it or do anything with it. Neither did I.

Yet Ellie gets increasingly anxious as they close the distance to the ranch. We learn that there are other complex reasons for this excitement, but we can’t help but wonder how much this narrator has imposed his own ideal on to his wife. We know she has always wanted to use the little money they make teaching to go on more vacations, but he prides himself in keeping it all in line. How often has he disregarded her dreams, excusing himself because he thinks he’s just keeping her in line?

By the time we get to the end of “The Casserole,” we are not too shocked by and maybe even expected what we find there. Some may find it quaint, but there is much to this story. It seems to me it is mostly about revealing to us the character of the narrator — his self-regard, his control, his complacency, his delusions, his ultimate nonchalance in the face of getting his casserole, his response at the end to the people on the ferry. Recommended.

"A Prairie Girl"
by Thomas McGuane
Originally published in the February 27, 2012 issue of The New Yorker.

I’ve been running behind on my New Yorker reading lately. Last night I made the goal (easy, since I have today off) to read the story in the morning, whatever it be. I was thrilled, then, that it was a story by Thomas McGuane, who I’ve been drawn to over the past years. His stories have a mixture of seriousness and humor, usually set in Montana or somewhere else in the American West, and this calls to me. I was also happy to see that the story was very short.

Though short, “A Prairie Girl” covers a lot of ground. It opens, I’m assuming, sometime in the last couple of decades of the twentieth century:

When the old brothel — known as the Butt Hut — closed down, years ago, the house it had occupied was advertised in the paper: “Home on the river: eight bedrooms, eight baths, no kitchen. Changing times force sale.”

The omniscient plural first-person narrator (quite a feat, if you can do it — it worked fine here; there is even a reference to the townspeople making up a fine Greek chorus) takes us comically through the history of the town by way of the brothel, presenting a nice local scene:

Who were they? Some were professionals from as far away as New Orleans and St. Louis. A surprising number were country schoolteachers, off for the summer. Some, from around the state, worked a day or two a week, but were otherwise embedded in conventional lives. When one of them married a local, the couple usually moved away, and over time our town lost a good many useful men — cowboys, carpenters, electricians. This pattern seemed to land most heavily on our tradespeople and worked a subtle hardship on the community. But it was supposed by the pious to be a sacrifice for the greater good.

When the brothel closed, all of the girls leave town save one, Mary Elizabeth Foley. She attended the Lutheran church and when a woman (her future mother-in-law) asked her where she was from, she said, “What business is it of yours?” McGuane goes for more humor: “Where was the meekness appropriate to a woman with her past? It was outrageous. From then on, the energy that ought to have been spent on listening to the service was dedicated to beaming malice at Mary Elizabeth Foley.”

Mary Elizabeth Foley is an ambitious woman, and she eventually weds — because she truly does love him and he loves her — Arnold, a gay man, the son of the president of the local bank. After all, “[s]he had been trained to accept the privacy of every dream world.”

The story moves quickly through their lives, much like an Alice Munro story. It says something for the story and its ambiguities that I wanted more, quite a bit more. I’m still trying to work out if that is a fault in an otherwise interesting story about the loving (though duplicitous) relationship between a former prostitute and a gay man in a tiny, judgmental community, but one where time can burnish faults. Where in a Munro story the clipped passage of time is part of the theme, I’m not sure it was here, and I wanted more room for the characters to develop.

Still, a nice story to get me back to reading The New Yorker fiction each week.

"The House on Sand Creek"
by Thomas McGuane
Originally published in the October 3, 2011 issue of The New Yorker.

I’m very excited about this one and will be posting my thoughts soon. Happy to hear from others in the meantime.

"The Good Samaritan"
by Thomas McGuane
Originally published in the April 25, 2011 issue of The New Yorker.

I don’t know much about Thomas McGuane. His most recent novel is Driving the Rim, a book set in Montana; here is a quick sentence from the Publishers Weeklyr eview: “Berl Pickett is a smalltown doctor whose ill-advised decision to try to cover up an old friend’s suicide attempt leads to dire consequences when she later dies from her injuries: his clinic privileges are suspended and he faces a possible criminal negligence charge.” For whatever reason, since I moved away from the Rocky Mountain west, I’m much more interested in books set in that region. It helps that the books have been superb, particularly Maile Meloy’s books of short stories and Larry Watson’s Montana 1948. So it looks like McGuane has a backlist I’ll be checking out: Some Horses, Ninety-Two in the Shade, Gallatin Canyon,  Nothing but Blue Skies, and The Longest Silence: A Life in Fishing, among others. And “The Good Samaritan” leads me to believe going through McGuane’s books will be well worth my time.

“The Good Samaritan” is also set in Montana. Szabo is a divorcee who has a day job at an office but rushes home at night to take care of a ranch, “a word that was now widely abused by developers. He preferred to call it his property, or ‘the property’ . . .” He devotes all his time to it: “Sometimes he was so eager to get started that he let his car running.” It’s enough to make him seem crazy; after all, “[h]is activity on the property, which had led, over the years, to arthroscopic surgery on his left knee, one vertebral fusion, and mild hearing loss, thanks to his diesel tractor, yielded very little income at all and some years not even that — a fact that he did not care to dwell on.” But, as McGuane soon says, “Szabo was not nuts. He had long understood that he needed to do something with his hands to compensate for the work that he did indoors, and it was not going to be golf or woodworking.”

One evening, Szabo is in such a hurry to mount his beloved John Deere tractor that he had an accident:

Here his foot slid off the step, leaving him briefly dangling from the handhold. A searing pain informed him that he had done something awful to his shoulder. Releasing his grip, he fell to the driveway in a heap. The usually ambrosial smell of tractor fuel repelled him, and the towering green shape above him now seemed reproachful.

This is just the beginning of this story that takes us all over the place. We learn what Szabo does in his daytime work when he has to call in to his assistant, Melinda, to ask her to find him some help. She certainly thinks he needs help at work, but he means on the property; he hates to admit it, but he needs some help on the property — for a short time. After a few interviews with some shady characters, Melinda thinks she’s found the perfect fit when she meets Barney:

He told Melinda that he was extremely well educated but “identified with the workingman” and thought a month or so in Szabo’s bunkhouse would do him a world of good.

I’m going to stop there. There’s no sense in spoiling the story by disclosing a few of the details of Szabo’s life that need dealt with. Needless to say, I recommend it, even if the ending did leave me a bit befuddled (I’m sure that was part of the point).