Crow Fair

Starred review from October 20, 2014
"Me and Ray thought you ought to see what dementia looks like,” a woman named Morsel tells Dave, who has just driven Ray across the prairie to visit Morsel and her peculiar father. It’s one of many funny, sad, and awful, awfully human moments from McGuane’s (Gallatin Canyon) latest story collection featuring aging cowboys, middle-aged men resistant to growing up, and the women who plague and perplex them. “Motherlode” traces the road trip to Morsel’s house from a not-so-chance encounter at a smalltown hotel to a scheme for selling drugs in Montana’s northern oil fields. McGuane’s Montana retains wistful and ironic echoes of the Old West. The title story recounts how two brothers handle their dying mother’s revelation of her long-ago love affair at the Crow Fair powwow/Wild West Show. With imagery as sparse and striking as the landscape, houses figure prominently. “Weight Watchers” shows a man who builds homes only for other people. The repossessed “House on Sand Creek” becomes home to a real estate lawyer, his Eastern European wife, her infant son, and Bob the babysitter. At the “Fishing Camp,” two longtime friends find their wilderness guide cannot stand being in the wilderness with men who keep arguing about the past. Among female characters, “Prairie Girl” shines as she makes her way from prostitute to bank president. A boy steals hubcaps; a shaman begs charity; a girl hikes toward the howling of wolves: McGuane’s stories highlight the detachment of young from old, husband from wife, neighbor from neighbor, the dying from life itself.

Starred review from January 1, 2015
Seventeen stories, straightforward but well-crafted, that cement McGuane's reputation as the finest short story writer of Big Sky country-and, at his best, beyond. These days, McGuane's writing could hardly be further from the showy, overwritten prose of his breakthrough novels like Ninety-two in the Shade (1973). His sense of humor remains, but it's wiser, more fatalistic and more Twain-like; he writes beautifully about the wilderness but always with an eye on its destructive power. As with much of his recent fiction, most of the stories here are set in Montana and turn on relationships going bust. In "Hubcaps," a young boy observes his parents' breakup through the filter of baseball and football games, capturing the protagonist's slowly emerging resentment; in "Lake Story," a man's long-running affair with a married woman collapses during an ill-advised public outing, exposing the thinness of the connections that united them; in "Canyon Ferry," a divorced dad's attempt to prove his intrepidness to his young son during an ice-fishing trip pushes them to the edge of disaster during a storm. One of the best stories in the collection, "River Camp," displays McGuane's skill at pairing emotional turmoil with the untamed outdoors, following two brothers-in-law whose attempt to get away from it all leads them to a tour guide of questionable mental stability, bears rustling through tents and plenty of exposed raw nerves about their marriages. "Stars" tells a similar story in a more interior mode, following an astronomer who increasingly fails to contain her anger at the workaday world-McGuane skillfully depicts the small but constant ways life goes off-plumb for her-and how she fumbles toward balance in the forest. The conflicts throughout this book are age-old-indeed, the title story evokes "Oedipus"-but McGuane's clean writing and psychological acuity enliven them all. A slyly cutting batch of tales from a contemporary master.

COPYRIGHT(2015) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from November 15, 2014
If one McGuane story could be called typical, it might be On a Dirt Road, told by a man curious about his new neighbors, the Jewels, a man and wife who studiously avoid contact. Dodging a dinner date with his wife's friends, the man forces himself on the Jewels and finds them charming, naive, and unquestionably odd. He gathers them up to crash his wife's dinner date, only to discover she's used the dinner date to cover for an assignation. Backdoor irony, you might call it, mixed with black humor. In The Good Samaritan the best hired hand who ever lived turns out to be a con artist. In Stars, a young woman tries out every conventional role, until gradually she sheds them all and goes wild. But another young woman shows great business acumen and rises from prostitution to bank president. McGuane can be very funny, as in Grandma and Me, in which the ne'er-do-well grandson shepherds his blind 90-year-old grandmother around a little Montana town, enduring her sometimes just, sometimes inaccurate belittlings for a modest stipend. Grandma is crazy, and so is her grandson, which becomes clear when a dead body passes by in the river, and he abandons Grandma to chase it. It's as if solving the mystery of the corpse would at last explain the universe. McGuane's stories are about the whacked-out order men and womenassign to things, but it's not the true order and merely contributes to a larger confusion that is not far from horror. Seventeen glum, gleeful, brilliant stories from the author of Gallatin Canyon (2006) and Driving on the Rim (2010).(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)

October 1, 2014

In his first collection in nine years, when Gallatin Canyon appeared, McGuane takes us back to Big Sky country with 17 stories. Seven are newly minted, while the remainder have appeared in The New Yorker, McSweeney's, and Granta, blue-ribbon publications all. Out there in the wild, McGuane's stories look at what's close: family, as a mother's behavior as she enters dementia unnerves her son; friendship, as two fishing buddies acknowledge that they really don't like each other; and personal failure, as an in-demand cattle inseminator compromises himself by accepting easy money.

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from December 1, 2014

Family ties form the focus of these turbulent stories, set mostly in Montana. The title story concerns the strained relationship of two brothers that's exacerbated by the discovery of their saintly mother's infidelity. "A Long View to the West" explores the highly ambivalent feelings of a son, a small-town car dealer, toward his father as he listens once again to his too-familiar stories when visiting him in the hospital. "River Camp" concerns another strained relationship, this one between lifelong friends who have booked a backwoods expedition in hopes of repairing their friendship only to find themselves in the hands of a mentally unstable guide. In "The Casserole," a seemingly comfortable marriage unexpectedly breaks up on the couple's 25th anniversary as they drive to her parents' house for what is supposed to be a celebratory get-together. VERDICT Very little about the world is ever as solid as it might seem for McGuane's solitary and troubled characters, as the foundations of their lives can give way at a moment's notice, leaving them suddenly bereft--or with only a casserole somehow stuffed into in a lunch pail to carry them through the long ride home. A compelling, emotionally charged collection. [See Prepub Alert, 9/15/14.]--Lawrence Rungren, Andover, MA

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

December 1, 2014

Family ties form the focus of these turbulent stories, set mostly in Montana. The title story concerns the strained relationship of two brothers that's exacerbated by the discovery of their saintly mother's infidelity. "A Long View to the West" explores the highly ambivalent feelings of a son, a small-town car dealer, toward his father as he listens once again to his too-familiar stories when visiting him in the hospital. "River Camp" concerns another strained relationship, this one between lifelong friends who have booked a backwoods expedition in hopes of repairing their friendship only to find themselves in the hands of a mentally unstable guide. In "The Casserole," a seemingly comfortable marriage unexpectedly breaks up on the couple's 25th anniversary as they drive to her parents' house for what is supposed to be a celebratory get-together. VERDICT Very little about the world is ever as solid as it might seem for McGuane's solitary and troubled characters, as the foundations of their lives can give way at a moment's notice, leaving them suddenly bereft--or with only a casserole somehow stuffed into in a lunch pail to carry them through the long ride home. A compelling, emotionally charged collection. [See Prepub Alert, 9/15/14.]--Lawrence Rungren, Andover, MA

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.