Gallatin Canyon

April 10, 2006
McGuane returns to the territories of his novels (Some Horses
, etc.) in this collection of stories set in Montana, Michigan and Florida. Most of the characters are older, divorced and still looking for attachment but without much hope of love. They are alcoholics (in "Vicious Circle" and "The Refugee"), junkies ("Northcoast"), low-grade ex-cons ("The Cowboy"), embezzlers ("Old Friends"), disconnected fathers ("The Zombie" and "Aliens") and lackluster ordinary men. In the title story, an unnamed smalltimer sets out on a business trip down the winding Gallatin Canyon, Mont., road with his girlfriend, Louise. He conducts his business dealings with phony bluster and indecision, humiliating himself in the eyes of this woman he hopes to marry; things get worse from there. Any attempts these characters make to draw happiness back into their lives backfires clumsily, pushing it further from their grasp. McGuane's sentences still have a playful quality, but the prevailing dreariness ("I wish I could feel something," exclaims Louise) is something other than inspiring.

April 15, 2006
McGuane's reputation is based on his early novels, including "The Bushwhacked Piano" (1971) and "Panama" (1978). More recently he has also become an accomplished essayist, but this new collection of stories suggests that short fiction may be his true calling. Most of these tales depict desperate men well past their midlife crises. They have mastered various skills but have little control over their daily lives. In -The Zombie, - a prosperous bank president hires a prostitute for his couch potato son, with disastrous results. In -Aliens, - a retired Boston lawyer returns home to Montana only to find himself jinxed by family ties. In -The Refugee, - an alcoholic veteran of Key West's countercultural Conch Republic seeks redemption. In this story in particular, McGuane fully lives up to the Hemingwayesque tag that is often attached to his name, achieving brilliant effects with nautical jargon. The title story, which first appeared in "The New Yorker" and later in "The Best American Short Stories, 2004", reduces the fabled Big Sky country to a handful of marketing cliché s. This impressive collection will appeal to fans of Robert Stone's book "Bear and His Daughter". Highly recommended." -Edward B. St. John, Loyola Law Sch. Lib., Los Angeles"

Copyright 2006 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from May 1, 2006
Gallatin Canyon is a narrow passage along a river in Idaho threaded with a heavily traveled highway. It can be a trap, which is the overarching metaphor in this collection of 10 finely chiseled short stories. McGuane, the author of nine novels, is prized for his uncanny knack for uniting flinty humor (aimed most often at male bewilderment) with classic landscape-inspired American lyricism, and he writes with particular intensity in these initially measured, then increasingly feverish, tales of odd encounters and doomed pairings, of men returning to their roots or heading for the hills. In "Ice," a teenager risks his life skating far out onto Lake Ontario in the dark. In "The Refugee," a spectacular story destined for a "best of" volume, a man suicidal with guilt sails the Caribbean, weathering monstrous storms and seeking absolution. Puzzlelike and peopled with cowboys, lawyers, junkies, and drunks, McGuane's virtuoso tales are studies in helplessness and withholding as men try to take control of themselves and their situations and instead are carried along on the great surging current of life, battered by other people's woes, tangled up in their own failings, and enraptured by the earth's grandeur.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2006, American Library Association.)