Decline of the West
WEST, WOODY
Decline of the West Thomas McGuane's flawed fiction. BY WOODY WEST If a reviewer expresses "disappointment" in a book, it is evident that the book's author is going to be roughed up. But if that...
...Evelyn, in an amatory fling fueled by booze and loneliness, picks up a barroom dude...
...If anything, he trumps son-in-law Paul's amorality with inventive cruelty...
...McGuane is also deft at landscape...
...In The Cadence of Grass, there are extensive sections about Champion and Evelyn and their horses...
...Although often wedged into one of the darker rooms of the literary mansion labeled "Western writer," Thomas McGuane has always been admiringly reviewed...
...But if that author has achieved a wide reputation for his craft—and had innumerable literary prizes bestowed upon him— then "disappointment" is actually a civil way to put it...
...Did I mention the cross-dressing Norwegian rancher who cremates his grandfather on a scrap-wood pyre during a blizzard...
...Then there's Evelyn on her horse Cree: "He was a nicely made colt with a butt that was closed right down to the back of his knee with muscle, feet set nicely under him and a pretty slope to his shoulder and withers...
...The wily South Asian turns out to dabble in a variety of enterprises, which include a bit of cross-border drug smuggling...
...The Longest Silence: A Life in Fishing is often ranked with Norman Maclean's A River Runs Through It...
...McGuane presumably intended these interludes to express a vestigial genuineness that would stand in contrast to the ravages of contemporary culture...
...McGuane's sketches and essays collected in Some Horses have been praised even by critics who've never been closer to a nag than the $2 window at the racetrack...
...Critics who combine a bookish sensibility with affinity for the outdoors rank him among the chosen...
...Bill Champion "looked out the window at low cliffs, sage-covered pastures, fences poking out of snow and enclosing nothing...
...This enterprise will finally and fatally involve Paul, deservedly, and the old-timer, Bill Champion, by the sort of circumstance that is more bathetic than convincing...
...Or take the padding apparent in this description of Evelyn saddling up for a ride: "Evelyn searched through the bridles that seemed, in her view, to be festooned from too few pegs, so that in hunting through them for the short shanked Kelly Brothers grazer, all she could find were snaffles, Argentines bits, a cable tie-down, offside billet straps, cinchas with broken strings, detached go-betweens, old steel stirrups...
...Marjub arrives in town after Sunny Jim's death...
...Sunny Jim has known from the time Evelyn and Paul married, and his son-in-law went to work for him, that Paul is a snake...
...There are some examples of McGuane's finely tuned observations in this tale...
...Evelyn is the only Whitelaw attuned to Champion and the range and horses, and over the years she has spent much time on the ranch (from which eventually comes a revelation that is not terribly surprising...
...and that lacks any center of gravity...
...The knot the deceased Sunny Jim has tied around his family provides the tension—such as it is—in The Cadence of Grass...
...The nub of the narrative is Sunny Jim's will...
...It seems cobbled together from bits of Yale drama school, the Stanford creative-writing program, and Hollywood—all three turfs Thomas McGuane has trod...
...The novel includes, of course, the obligatory litany of environmental degradation in Montana: "Kill the buffalo that roamed out of Yellowstone, kill the wolves wherever found, lower water-quality standards, undermine the laws of the Indian reservations, strip mine the prairie, . . . and make animal-control poisons more readily available...
...The novel opens the day of Sunny Jim's funeral, the family brought together "by the apparently complete lack of feeling for the deceased...
...The patriarch of this turbulent tribe, Sunny Jim Whitelaw, owns the local soft-drink plant...
...Champion evidently is intended by McGuane as a counterpoise of authenticity to the mutually destructive members of the Whitelaw family—but it is with Champion that the reader first senses the novel's compass is wobbly...
...About the most civil thing a reviewer can say about The Cadence of Grass is that it's a disappointment...
...And so dismally forth...
...Ranches looked like remote fortresses in the distance, white crowns of snow, blue shadows of road cuts...
...Paul has been running the soft-drink enterprise into the ground, and the family members frantically want cash rather than the mutual antagonism of continued economic confinement in a failing enterprise...
...She looked at her young dance partner and wondered if he yet understood that all the cures for loneliness failed, that it was a chronic state and that anything used to anesthetize it turned into its own problem...
...His marriage to Evelyn Whitelaw has ended, not least because he also was bonking (in that useful British euphemism) her sister Natalie...
...There is a factitious mood to the novel, a sense that it neither explores nor much cares about human hearts or heads...
...Her latest fear is that she has stopped "emitting pheromones," while her husband, Stuart, is bland to just this side of catatonia...
...Present also is Bill Champion, Sunny Jim's partner in a cattle ranch that has never been able to pay its way...
...He knows Paul has been stealing from him and has told Paul he would recoup his losses by "selling [Paul's] vital organs, if these thefts should recur...
...A savage beating cements her decision to reject him, though this could leave all hands destitute...
...She was a little sickle-hocked, which I'm sure he preferred, and she had good withers, short pasterns, a kind of coon-footed, low-croup cow-horse look to her...
...If Paul and Evelyn reconcile, the bottling plant can be sold, the assets divided...
...a coppermouth John Israel, a gag bit, an Easy Stop, a knockoff of a Garcia spade, boot tops made into saddlebags and a chain twitch with a handle from a World War II foxhole shovel...
...And on and on it goes...
...Those qualities are present in his new novel, The Cadence of Grass—but not enough to redeem a book that did not seem to be begging to be written Woody West is associate editor at the Washington Times...
...The land was wired together with telephone and electrical wires, railroad lines and highways, as if it might otherwise drift apart...
...And C.R...
...Paul does not believe him, but one evening, after joining his father-in-law in a goatish spree, he wakes up in a post-surgical setting minus a kidney...
...He had tight, round hoofs at the end of moderately sloped pasterns nicely domed around the frog that took a size-aught shoe and never split out a nail or chipped when he was barefoot, but left a rounded, nearly burnished edge...
...But the deep gully in The Cadence of Grass is that a reader reaches the final page without caring a hoot what happens to any of the characters...
...Mar-jub, a longtime—and hitherto unknown—associate of Sunny Jim's, as it happens, required a kidney transplant...
...The story concerns a man named Paul Caruso, who is handsome, charming, and without two moral molecules to rub together...
...Natalie has just returned from her latest drug-rehab session to the Montana hometown where she has a reputation for shoplifting...
...And it is generally acknowledged that McGuane can write with grace, wit, and effect...
...And Evelyn wants nothing more to do with her estranged husband...
...Reminiscing about an old cowpoke he'd known, for example, Champion says, "He led his sorrel mare out of the pen...
...One suspects that McGuane churned it out because it is his trade to write: a writerly walk on the weird side...
...Well, okay...
Vol. 7 • May 2002 • No. 33
