{"id":10329,"date":"2013-10-28T00:39:41","date_gmt":"2013-10-28T04:39:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/?p=10329"},"modified":"2013-10-28T12:01:10","modified_gmt":"2013-10-28T16:01:10","slug":"thomas-mcguane-weight-watchers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/2013\/10\/28\/thomas-mcguane-weight-watchers\/","title":{"rendered":"Thomas McGuane: “Weight Watchers”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Click here<\/a> to read the abstract of the story on The New Yorker<\/em>\u00a0webpage (this week’s story is available only for subscribers). Thomas McGuane\u2019s \u201cWeight Watchers\u201d was originally published in the November 4, 2013 issue of The New Yorker<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\"Click<\/a>
Click for a larger image.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Trevor<\/strong><\/p>\n

I love Thomas McGuane, so I’m thrilled to see another story by him in this week’s issue. I’ll have thoughts up here soon.<\/p>\n

Betsy<\/strong><\/p>\n

I love this story.\u00a0Thomas McGuane is wry, dry, and dead serious. I love the combination.<\/p>\n

The tone of this story works its effects on you sentence by sentence, and everything about this story is too good to waste. What I mean is, go no further here before you read this story.<\/p>\n

\u201cWeight Watchers\u201d tells the story of a family in the blink of an eye; it\u2019s oddly like some advice about how to deal with Thanksgiving:\u00a0listen from a decent distance, with love, accept what you hear, with love, take a deep breath, notice the distance; repeat.<\/p>\n

The narrator is a guy who\u2019s educated but does construction, a guy who says, \u201cI like to be tired. In some ways, that\u2019s the point of what I do.\u201d Part of the tone is in the measured acceptance and distance with which this man treats his completely dysfunctional, interesting mother and father, and part of what appeals about the tone is the way he treats his readers. This is a man who, considering his parents, should be curled up in a ball, incapacitated and howling. \u00a0Instead, he loves his work. Perhaps\u00a0he has chosen to love his work.<\/p>\n

I feel a certain kinship with this fellow:\u00a0I just spent\u00a0eight days at a comfortable hunting lodge in Maine and most of the hunters reminded me of this guy. Hunting woodcock in Maine is so difficult it boggles the mind and exhausts the body. The hunters there all put in an eight hour day trying to pry the woodcock loose from a forest so thick it must have been what the authors of Sleeping Beauty had in mind when they told about how her castle was girded with thorns.\u00a0We all, known by just our first names, sat every night at a long communal table to eat a fine meal, which we inhaled before tumbling out of the hall to sleep the sleep of the just.\u00a0My husband, being a prince, thinks I\u2019m good company, so he takes me on his hunting trips where I take pictures. We both shoot birds, so to speak.\u00a0This place we went has no cell phone coverage and not very much wifi.\u00a0All of the other hunters were there solo, living out a temporary few days of life on the river, away, away, away, and tumbling into bed each night, like the narrator, too tired to think.<\/p>\n

\u201cI have a cell phone,\u201d says the guy talking to us from Thomas McGuane\u2019s wonderful story, \u201cbut I only use it to call out.\u201d<\/p>\n

With holidays coming up, this narrator\u2019s very messy origins and his attitude toward it satisfy, much the way reading about the life of the Zen monk can sometimes satisfy.\u00a0Reading it, you believe, even if only for a minute, that it can be done.<\/p>\n

Not only do I like McGuane\u2019s wild portrait of the American family, I like the way he lets us consider our recent heritage\u00a0— the Vietnam War, the rust belt, the (necessary) return to basics.<\/p>\n

I also liked so much the way I only noticed when I sat down to write that I didn\u2019t know the narrator\u2019s name\u00a0— a fitting situation for a self-effacing man with a capacity for forgiveness.<\/p>\n

\u201cWeight Watchers\u201d is about all the different kinds of weight a person could do well to shed\u00a0— rage, the urge to whine, ineffectiveness, the media room, insomnia.\u00a0But it\u2019s also about if you\u2019re able to shed those things —\u00a0you might be talking about being a monk.\u00a0Most of us are only able to do it a few minutes at a time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Click here to read the abstract of the story on The New Yorker\u00a0webpage (this week’s story is available only for subscribers). Thomas McGuane\u2019s \u201cWeight Watchers\u201d was originally published in the November 4, 2013 issue of The New Yorker. Trevor I love Thomas McGuane, so I’m thrilled to see another story by him in this week’s … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"libsyn-item-id":0,"libsyn-show-id":0,"libsyn-post-error":"","libsyn-post-error_post-type":"","libsyn-post-error_post-permissions":"","libsyn-post-error_api":"","playlist-podcast-url":"","libsyn-episode-thumbnail":"","libsyn-episode-widescreen_image":"","libsyn-episode-blog_image":"","libsyn-episode-background_image":"","libsyn-post-episode-category-selection":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_thumbnail":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_theme":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_height":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_width":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_placement":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_download_link":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_download_link_text":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_custom_color":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-explicit":"","libsyn-post-episode":"","libsyn-post-episode-update-id3":"","libsyn-post-episode-release-date":"","libsyn-post-episode-simple-download":"","libsyn-release-date":"","libsyn-post-update-release-date":"","libsyn-is_draft":"","libsyn-new-media-media":"","libsyn-post-episode-subtitle":"","libsyn-new-media-image":"","libsyn-post-episode-keywords":"","libsyn-post-itunes":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-number":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-season-number":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-type":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-title":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-author":"","libsyn-destination-releases":"","libsyn-post-episode-advanced-destination-form-data":"","libsyn-post-episode-advanced-destination-form-data-enabled":"","libsyn-post-episode-advanced-destination-form-data-input-enabled":false,"libsyn-post-episode-premium_state":"","libsyn-episode-shortcode":"","libsyn-episode-embedurl":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[94,252],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-10329","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-new-yorker-fiction","category-thomas-mcguane"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pqqvZ-2GB","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10329","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10329"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10329\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10336,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10329\/revisions\/10336"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10329"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10329"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10329"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=10329"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}