Cloudbursts

January 1, 2018
A career-spanning collection of short stories from McGuane, who's observed America's outskirts with equal measures of pathos and humor.This gathers McGuane's three previous books of stories (To Skin a Cat, 1986; Gallatin Canyon, 2006; Crow Fair, 2015) and adds eight uncollected tales, cementing his reputation as a keen writer on underexplored territories, especially Big Sky Country, rural Northern California, and Key West. Putting all these stories in one place also spotlights the evolution of his prose over time. In his early stories, he could pull off a Cheever-esque domestic drama like "The Millionaire," about a family secreting away their pregnant teenage daughter at a summer home, but more often delivered strained yarns constructed around easy symbolic conflicts, like "A Skirmish," a tale of childhood bullying involving Civil War caps, or the travails of overly flirty men, as in "Partners" or "Like a Leaf." The newer stories, by contrast, are at once sturdier and more sensitive, especially "Kangaroo," about a recidivist parolee gathering his late mother's ashes and the parole officer chasing him down, or "The Driver," about a child who's an unwitting victim of his mother's neglect. But grown-up relationships, both romantic and platonic, are his consistent focus: the epic Gallatin Canyon story "The Refugee" features a man sailing to Key West to expunge his brain of a lost love and a dead friend; a new story, "Papaya," describes an abusive relationship he was in. Like McGuane's contemporaries Jim Harrison and Richard Ford, masculinity is much on his mind, but he's not much for machismo: the narrator of "Little Bighorn" recalls a busted relationship as a young man with self-deprecating humor, while in "Tango," a doctor remembers his early struggle to connect with a woman and the tragic consequences of their failure to communicate.A stellar writer on the outdoors who's gotten better at describing interior wildernesses over time.

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Starred review from February 5, 2018
This outstanding career-capping volume combines McGuane’s three published story collections (To Skin a Cat, Gallatin Canyon, and Crow Fair) with eight new stories, together demonstrating how the Montana author’s portraits of people (mainly men) who fail to connect to or comprehend other people (mainly women) have grown darker, funnier, and more complex over time. In an early story, “The Road Atlas,” a couple’s relationship falters as they plan a road trip. In the more recent “Little Bighorn,” a splintering couple plans to join another splintering couple for a visit to the site of Custer’s Last Stand. Parental distraction leads to confusion in “Miracle Boy” and tragedy in “The Driver.” Like their predecessors, protagonists in later stories entrap themselves by making poor choices. The runaway parolee of “Kangaroo” heads home, his probation officer and a trigger-happy sniper close behind. Errol Headley of “The Refugee” sets sail again in “Papaya,” only to be washed ashore and put to work shoveling bat guano. In pursuit of lost causes, an aging California hippie refurbishes a rotting boat (“Viking Burial”); adult siblings recall their parents’ divorce (“Ghost Riders in the Sky”); and a premed student attends dance class (“Tango”). The last story, “Riddle,” in which a man becomes utterly perplexed after witnessing a joyous moment, exemplifies McGuane’s casual, conversational style and well-honed craftsmanship. Brief, stormy, and refreshing, McGuane’s stories erupt like the namesake of this marvelous collection.

Starred review from February 1, 2018
To read straight through a career-spanning collection of short stories is to see the writer's obsessions laid bare through recurring themes. And if McGuane's earlier works reveal a predilection for hunting, dogs, and eccentrics, those stories remain relatable to those who've never pulled a trigger or watched a dog quivering on point. (The opener, Sportsmen, about two young duck hunters, remains one of his finest, and Flight, about two men's final hunt together, is equally if oppositely powerful.) The eccentrics continue to appear throughout his career, though they begin to look more and more like us: McGuane has a way of revealing mundane experience through extraordinary circumstance and can provoke powerful emotion in readers despite the frequent flatness of his prose. Cowboy, which first appeared in the New Yorker in 2005, is still a stunner. It should also be said that he's damn funny: regardless of its bullet-in -the-head ending, just try to read 2014's Motherlode without laughing again and again at the trio of would-be meth dealers. As his frequent appearances in Best American Short Stories attest, McGuane is a master, choosing his words with a lapidary's precision and setting them in sentences that burn brightly, finishing his stories with epiphanies to treasure. Libraries containing To Skin a Cat (1986), Gallatin Canyon (2006), and Crow Fair (2015), his three previous collections, will already possess the majority of these stories. But there are four new works here, as well as four previously uncollected gems, and fans of the form should devour this opus from one of our finest living short-story writers.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)