McGuane, Thomas 1939–

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McGuane, Thomas 1939–

(Thomas Francis McGuane, III)

PERSONAL: Born December 11, 1939, in Wyandotte, MI; son of Thomas Francis (a manufacturer) and Alice (Torphy) McGuane; married Portia Rebecca Crockett, September 8, 1962 (divorced, 1975); married Margot Kidder (an actress), August, 1976 (divorced May, 1977); married Laurie Buffett, September 19, 1977; children: (first marriage) Thomas Francis IV; (second marriage) Maggie; (third marriage) Anne Buffett, Heather (stepdaughter). Education: Attended University of Michigan and Olivet College; Michigan State University, B.A., 1962; Yale University, M.F.A., 1965; additional study at Stanford University, 1966–67.

ADDRESSES: Home—Box 25, McLeod, MT 59052. Agent—Amanda Urban, International Creative Management, 40 West 57th St., New York, New York, 10019.

CAREER: Full-time writer.

MEMBER: Tale Club of New York.

AWARDS, HONORS: Wallace Stegner fellowship, Stanford University, 1966–67; Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Foundation Award in fiction from American Academy, 1971, for The Bushwacked Piano; National Book Award fiction nomination, 1974, for Ninety-two in the Shade; Montana Governor's Award for the Arts, 1988; Northwestern Bookseller's Award, 1992; Golden Plate Award, American Academy Achievement, 1993; honorary doctorate degrees from Montana State University, 1993, and Rocky Mountain College, 1995.

WRITINGS:

NOVELS

The Sporting Club, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 1969.

The Bushwacked Piano (also see below), Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 1971.

Ninety-two in the Shade (also see below), Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 1973, reprinted, Vintage (New York, NY), 1995.

Panama, Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 1977, reprinted, Vintage (New York, NY), 1995.

Nobody's Angel (also see below), Random House (New York, NY), (New York, NY), 1982.

Something to Be Desired, Random House (New York, NY), 1984.

Keep the Change (also see below), Houghton (Boston, MA), 1989.

Nothing but Blue Skies, Houghton (Boston, MA), 1992, reprinted, Vintage (New York, NY), 1994.

Three Complete Novels: Keep the Change, Nobody's Angel, and The Bushwacked Piano, Wings Books (New York, NY), 1993.

The Cadence of Grass, Knopf (New York, NY), 2002.

SCREENPLAYS

Rancho Deluxe, United Artists, 1975.

(Also director) Ninety-two in the Shade (adapted from his novel of the same title), United Artists, 1975.

Missouri Breaks (produced by United Artists, 1976), Ballantine (New York, NY), 1976.

(With Bud Shrake) Tom Horn, Warner Brothers, 1980.

Also author (with Jim Harrison) of Cold Feet.

OTHER

An Outside Chance: Essays on Sport, Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 1980, reprinted as An Outside Chance: Classic & New Essays on Sports, Houghton (Boston, MA), 1990.

In the Crazies: Book and Portfolio, Winn Books (Seattle, WA), 1984.

To Skin a Cat (short stories), Dutton (New York, NY), 1986.

Silent Seasons: Twenty-one Fishing Stories, Clark City Press (Livingston, MT), 1988.

Live Water, with paintings and drawings by John Swan, Meadow Run Press (Stone Harbor, NJ), 1996.

The Longest Silence: A Life of Fishing, Knopf (New York, NY), 1999.

Some Horses, Vintage (New York, NY), 1999.

(With an introduction by Charles Lindsey) Upstream (photography), Aperture (New York, NY), 2000.

Special contributor to Sports Illustrated, 1969–73.

ADAPTATIONS: The Sporting Club was adapted by Lorenzo Semple, Jr., for a full-length film released by Avco Embassy Pictures in 1971.

SIDELIGHTS: Thomas McGuane has been described in the New York Times Book Reviewas a "highly self-conscious literary grandson of Ernest Hemingway." McGuane's fiction—some of which shares locales and sensibilities with that of Hemingway—brings an ironic twist to the plight of the modern American male. "Thomas McGuane likes dogs, horses, Indians, golf, the road, hawks, rocks, peppery food and outdoor sex," wrote Beverly Lowry in the New York Times Book Review. "For characters he has a soft spot for loony old men, hateful, dead or vanished fathers, hot-blooded, sharp-tongued women, struggling protagonists with high-stakes, dangerous male friends…. Much more than the things of fiction, however, Mr. McGuane is concerned with irony, voice, lingo, dialogue that cries to be read aloud, descriptive passages that are never coy or sloppy. Which is to say that although facts and not literature itself form the backdrop against which he performs, what he's really after is language—fully extended and at serious play." In novels, screenplays and short fiction, McGuane has combined a fascination with language and an affection for macho heroes who—with humor or pathos—retreat from the banality of their middle class backgrounds toward more authentic and self-aware lives.

McGuane's first three novels established his reputation as a flamboyant stylist and satirist. The Sporting Club, The Bushwacked Piano and Ninety-two in the Shade juxtapose the ugly materialism of modern America against the beauty and power of the natural world. According to Detroit magazine writer Gregory Skwira, this trio of books perfectly captures "the hip disillusionment and general disorientation of the late 1960s." Although his early work had earned him high praise from the literary establishment, McGuane temporarily abandoned the novel in the early 1970s for work in the film industry. The personal chaos he experienced during that time is reflected in such later novels as Panama, Something to Be Desired, and Nothing but Blue Skies. In these books, emotional depth and honesty take precedence over stylistic flamboyance, and many critics regard them as McGuane's finest.

McGuane grew up in an Irish family where storytelling was a natural art. When he announced his intention to become a writer, however, his parents disapproved of his ambition, calling it hopelessly impractical. To counter their skepticism, McGuane devoted himself almost exclusively to his artistic efforts. While his university classmates enjoyed traditional college parties and diversions, McGuane wrote, read voraciously, studied the novel, or engaged in esoteric discussions with fellow students and contemporary novelists Jim Harrison and William Hjortsberg. McGuane's sober disposition earned him the nickname "The White Knight." His singlemindedness paid off: The Sporting Club was published when he was nearly thirty, The Bushwacked Pianoand Ninety-two in the Shade followed in quick succession. The plots of these three novels are very different, but they are closely linked in style, theme, and tone. Each is written in what R.T. Smith called in American Book Review "amphetamine-paced, acetylene-bright prose." "All present a picture of an America which has evolved into a 'declining snivelization' (from Bushwacked), a chrome-plated, chaotic landscape which threatens to lead right-thinking men to extremes of despair or utter frivolity," explained Larry McCaffrey in Fiction International. "Each of them presents main characters … who have recognized the defiled state of affairs around them, and who are desperately seeking out a set of values which allows them, as Skelton [the protagonist of Ninety-two in the Shade] puts it, 'to find a way of going on.'" In McCaffrey's estimation, the most remarkable thing about McGuane's writing is that he is "able to take the elements of this degraded condition and fashion from them shocking, energetic, and often beautiful works of prose—works which both mirror and comment upon our culture and … in their eloquence, transcend it."

McGuane's intense approach to his art was altered forever in 1972. Driving at 120 miles per hour on a trip from Montana to Key West, he lost control of his car and was involved in a serious accident. He walked away from it physically unharmed, but so profoundly shaken that he was unable to speak for some time thereafter. After this brush with death, his relentless concentration on writing seemed misguided to him. McCaffrey quoted McGuane in the Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook: "After the accident, I finally realized I could stop pedaling so intensely, get off the bike and walk around the neighborhood…. It was getting unthinkable to spend another year sequestered like that, writing, and I just dropped out." McGuane was also finding it increasingly difficult to support his family on a novelist's income; while his books had received critical acclaim, none had been best-sellers. Accordingly, when movie producer Elliot Kastner asked him if he would be interested in a film project, McGuane eagerly accepted. Over the next few years he wrote several screenplays, and directed the screen version of Ninety-two in the Shade.

Changes were not limited to the author's work; his personal life was undergoing a transformation as well. Together with the other members of "Club Mandible"—a loosely-structured group of friends including singer Jimmy Buffett—McGuane began to enjoy a hedonistic lifestyle. He explained to Thomas Carney in Esquire: "I had paid my dues…. Enough was enough. In 1962 I had changed from a sociopath to a bookworm and now I just changed back. Buffett was in the same shape. We both heard voices telling us to do something." Accordingly, writes Carney, "McGuane the straight arrow who had spent years telling his friends how to live their lives while he lived his like a hermit became McGuane the boogie chieftain, rarely out of full dance regalia. The White Knight began staying out all night, enjoying drugs and drink in quantities. And women other than his wife."

McGuane's name began appearing in tabloids when he became romantically involved with actress Elizabeth Ashley during the shooting of his first film, Rancho Deluxe. While still linked with Ashley, McGuane began an affair with Margot Kidder, while both actresses were working on Ninety-two in the Shade. When McGuane and his first wife, Becky, divorced, Becky married the male lead of Ninety-two in the Shade, Peter Fonda. Tom McGuane subsequently married Margot Kidder, already the mother of his second child. McGuane and Kidder divorced several months later. The unexpected deaths of his father and sister compounded the confusion in McGuane's life. He told Skwira that the media depiction of his activities at that time was "overblown," but admitted, "I had a lot of fun drinking and punching people out for a short period of time."

The turmoil of that interval was clearly reflected in Panama, McGuane's first novel in four years. It is a first-person description of the disintegrating life of rock star Chester Hunnicutt Pomeroy, an overnight sensation who is burning out on his excessive lifestyle. In McCaffrey's words, Panama "in many ways appears to be a kind of heightened, surreal portrayal of McGuane's own suffering, self-delusion, and eventual self-understanding—a book which moves beyond his earlier novels' satiric and ironic stances." The book drew strong reactions, both favorable and unfavorable. Many reviewers who had unreservedly praised McGuane's earlier work received Panama coldly, with some implying that the author's screenwriting stint had ruined him as a novelist. In a Washington Post Book World essay, Jonathan Yardley dismissed Panama as "a drearily self-indulgent little book, a contemplation of the price of celebrity that was, in point of fact, merely an exploitation of the author's new notoriety." Richard Elman complained in the New York Times Book Review that Panama "is all written up in a blowsy, first-person prose that goes in all directions and winds up being, basically, a kvetch." He stated that McGuane, "who was once upon a time wacky and droll [and who] is now sloppy and doleful," suffers from an inability to recognize "good" versus "bad" writing. "Everything of craft that must be done right is done wrong…. This book isn't written; it is hallucinated. The reader is asked to do the writer's work of imagining."

Other reviewers applauded Panama as the novel that finally joins McGuane's stylistic brilliance with an emotional intensity lacking in his earlier efforts. Susan Lardner suggested in a New Yorker review that McGuane's work as a director perhaps enriched the subsequent novel: "Maybe as a result of the experience, he has added to his store of apprehensions some dismal views of fame and the idea that life is a circus performance…. Whatever risk McGuane may have sensed in attempting a fourth novel with a simultaneous plunge into first person narration, the feat proves successful. The audience is left dazzled by the ingenuity of his turn, somewhat aghast at the swagger, hungry for more." Writing in the Washington Post Book World,Philip Caputo called it McGuane's "most relentlessly honest novel…. Although Panama is as well written as its predecessors, its first-person point of view endows it with a greater directness; and the book not only gives us a look at the void, it takes us down into it…. Panama also contains some of the finest writing McGuane has done so far." Village Voice contributor Gary L. Fisketjon noted: "Panama is more ambitious if less slick than the earlier novels, which were restrained and protected by the net of a hot-wired style and a consummate mockery; the humor here is not as harsh, and the objectivity is informed more by empathy than disdain…. Moving beyond satire, McGuane has achieved something difficult and strange, a wonderfully written novel that balances suffering and understanding." And in a Toronto Globe & Mail essay, Thad McIlroy deemed Panama "one of the best books to have been published in the United States in the last 20 years. It's minimal, mad, disjointed at times, and consistently brilliant, terrifying and exhilarating. McGuane's use of language, and his ever-precise ear for dialogue, raise the novel out of the actual and into the universal, the realm of our finest literature."

McGuane's life stabilized considerably after his 1977 marriage to Laurie Buffett, sister of his friend Jimmy Buffett. Living on his Montana ranch, the author perfected his riding and roping techniques and became a serious rodeo competitor. He commented to Carney in Esquire, "I've come to the point where art is no longer as important as life. Dropping six or seven good colts in the spring is just as satisfying as literature." McGuane's new down-to-earth attitude carried over to his prose style, as he explained to a Detroit magazine interviewer: "I'm trying to remove the tour de force or superficially flashy side of my writing. I'm trying to write a cleaner, plainer kind of American English…. I feel I have considerably better balance than I have ever had in my life and I don't care to show off; I just want to get the job done." Christopher Lehmann-Haupt referred favorably to McGuane's new direction in his New York Times review of the novel Nobody's Angel: "Both the author's affection for his characters and the strength of his narrative seem to matter even more to him than his compulsion to be stylistically original."

While Nobody's Angel echoes the dark tone of Panama, McGuane's next novel marks the first time that one of his restless protagonists finds fulfillment. Something to Be Desired revolves around Lucien Taylor and his two loves, Emily and Suzanne. When Emily, the more seductive and mysterious of the two, drops Lucien to marry a doctor, Lucien marries the virtuous Suzanne. The newlyweds go to work in Central America, where Lucien finds himself unable to forget Emily. When he hears she has murdered her husband, he deserts his wife and child to bail her out. He moves to Emily's ranch and becomes her lover, but she soon jumps bail, leaving him the ranch. Lucien converts it into a resort and finds happiness in a reconciliation with his family. Ronald Varney commented in the Wall Street Journal that "the somewhat bizarre plot twists of Mr. McGuane's story occasionally seem implausible…. And yet Mr. McGuane manages to pull this story off rather well, giving it, as in his other novels, such a compressed dramatic style that the reader is constantly entertained and diverted." New York Times Book Review critic Robert Roper named McGuane's sixth novel "his best, a remarkable work of honest colors and fresh phrasings that deliver strong, earned emotional effects."

With his 1989 novel Keep the Change, McGuane "expanded his emotional territory and deepened his literary and human concerns," to quote New York Times Book Review contributor Beverly Lowry. The story centers on Joe Starling, a struggling artist who travels to Montana to take possession of a cattle ranch he is not even sure he wants. During a season of ranching on the family farm, Joe confronts the peculiar characters who have their own ambitions for the land as well as the changing landscape of his hometown of Deadrock. In her review of the work, Lowry concluded: "I don't know of another writer who can walk Thomas McGuane's literary high wire. His vaunted dialogue has not been overpraised; authenticity for him is only the beginning. He can describe the sky, a bird, a rock, the dawn, with such grace that you want to go see for yourself; then he can zip to a scene so funny that it makes you laugh out loud…. It's encouraging to see a good writer getting better."

Mid-life crisis is the subject of McGuane's eighth novel, Nothing but Blue Skies. The protagonist, Frank Copenhaver, suddenly finds himself separated from his wife and in dire financial straits due to his own wacky behavior. Noting that Frank is "a fully fleshed, believable character," Bloomsbury Review correspondent Gregory McNamee added that the book is "a well-considered study of a man confronting midlife crisis and, in the end, overcoming it by sheer force of will." Time magazine reviewer John Skow wrote of the work: "McGuane, whose recent novels have seemed a touch broody, enjoys himself with this one. The fine barrelhouse prose of The Bushwacked Piano and Ninety-Two in the Shade is working again. He waves his arms, he hoots and hollers and thrashes out a rowdy parody of the male psyche under the stress of having to defend itself in the supermarket."

A full decade after publication of Nothing but Blue Skies came McGuane's ninth novel, 2002's The Cadence of Grass. Here Jim Whitelaw's death leaves his family in a pickle: he has decreed that his daughter, Evelyn, must stay with her husband Paul in order to sell the family business, a bottling franchise. But Evelyn is in the middle of dumping Paul. Soon her entire family is persuading her to stand by her man, if only for the sake of the money. Library Journal's Jim Coan commended the cast of "quirky, humorous, and sometimes downright dangerous characters" in this "absorbing, meaningful, and brilliantly written" novel. Similarly, Daniel Fierman, writing in Entertainment Weekly, found the novel a "surprising, affecting mix of bitterness and delicacy." A critic for Publishers Weekly felt that The Cadence of Grass "has the hip feel of Panama, without the drugs and hallucinations." Esquire's Scott Raab, however, dubbed the book a "truncated horse opera … [and] pinched of life." Raab further noted, "I dislike it so much—that after finishing it, I immediately reread The Sporting Club, [McGuane's] first novel, to see what had gone wrong." Responding to other negative reviews of the novel, Tom Pilkington in World and I felt that such a reception "has been unfair." While Pilkington went on to comment that The Cadence of Grass is "not a great novel," and "not even McGuane's best," the reviewer still thought that the book "has its rewards." Among these are the book's final pages, which contain "some of the best writing McGuane has ever done." For Pilkington, "The tone is elegiac, and for all the novel's bizarre humor, elegy is precisely the grace note The Cadence of Grass should end on."

McGuane's work has drawn comparisons to many famous authors, including William Faulkner, Albert Camus, Thomas Pynchon, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and most especially to Hemingway. Both McGuane and Heming-way portray virile heroes and anti-heroes vibrantly aware of their own masculinity; each author explores themes of men pitted against themselves and other men; each passionately loves game fishing and the outdoors.

Discussing Ninety-two in the Shade, Thomas R. Edwards of the New York Times Book Review claimed: "Clearly this is Hemingway country. Not just the he-man pleasures of McGuane's men but even the locales of the novels … recapitulate Hemingway's western-hemisphere life and works." McCaffrey concurred in a Fiction International piece: "If [the set of value-systems of McGuane's protagonists] sounds very familiar to Hemingway's notion of a 'code' devised to help one face up to an empty universe, it should; certainly McGuane's emphasis on male aggressions, his ritualized scenes involving fishing,… and even the locales (Key West, the upper Rockies, up in Michigan) suggest something of Papa's influence, though with a distinctly contemporary, darkly humorous flavor."

When asked by Carter in Fiction International about the numerous Hemingway comparisons, McGuane replied: "I admire him, of course, and share a lot of similar interests, but I really don't write like him…. We have totally different styles. His world view was considerably more austere than mine. His insistence on his metaphysical closed system was fanatical. And he was a fanatic. But it gave him at his best moments a very beautiful prose style. And anyone who says otherwise is either stupid or is a lying sack of snake shit. We have few enough treasures in this twerp-ridden Republic to have to argue over Ernest Hemingway's greatness." To John Dorschner of the Miami Herald he speculated, "I can only agree that [my life and Hemingway's] appear to be similar, but that's all. What might be more pertinent is to think how my father was influenced by Hemingway. Places like the Keys and northern Michigan, those were places I was taken by my father."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Authors in the News, Volume 2, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1976.

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), Volume 3, 1975; Volume 7, 1977; Volume 18, 1981; Volume 45, 1987.

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 2: American Novelists since World War II, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1978.

Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook: 1980, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1981.

Klinkowitz, Jerome, The New American Novel of Manners: The Fiction of Richard Yates, Dan Wakefield, and Thomas McGuane, University of Georgia Press (Athens, GA), 1986.

Wallace, Jon, The Politics of Style: Language as Theme in the Fiction of Berger, McGuane, and McPherson, Hollowbrook (Montrose, CO), 1992.

Westrum, Dexter, Thomas McGuane, Twayne (Boston, MA), 1991.

PERIODICALS

America, May 15, 1971.

American Book Review, May-June, 1983.

Antioch Review, spring, 2000, Carolyn Maddux, review of Some Horses, p. 244.

Atlantic, September, 1973.

Bloomsbury Review, July-August, 1993, Gregory McNamee, review of Nothing but Blue Skies.

Book, May-June, 2002, Josh Karp, "Margaritaville, Inc.," p. 12.

Booklist, September 1, 1999, Dennis Dodge, review of The Longest Silence, p. 61; June 1, 1999, Fred Egloff, review of "Some Horses," p. 1760.

Book World, May 2, 1971.

Chicago Tribune, November 5, 1978; April 12, 1985; November 3, 1986.

Chicago Tribune Books, October 14, 1990.

Chicago Tribune Book World, February 15, 1981.

Commonweal, October 26, 1973.

Crawdaddy, February, 1979.

Critique, August, 1975.

Detroit News, April 25, 1982; November 18, 1984.

Detroit News Magazine, August 17, 1980.

Entertainment Weekly, May 10, 2002, Daniel Fierman, review of The Cadence of Grass, p. 74.

Esquire, June 6, 1978; July, 2002, Scott Raab, review of The Cadence of Grass, p. 22.

Feature, February, 1979.

Fiction International, fall/winter, 1975.

Globe & Mail (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), January 26, 1985; April 4, 1987.

Hudson Review, winter, 1973–74.

Library Journal, May 15, 1999, Deborah Emerson, review of Some Horse, p. 122; October 1, 1999, Will Hepfer, review of The Longest Silence, p. 103; May 15, 2002, Jim Coan, review of The Cadence of Grass, p. 126.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, September 17, 1989.

Miami Herald, October 13, 1974.

Nation, January 31, 1981; March 20, 1982.

New Mexico Humanities Review, fall, 1983.

New Republic, August 18, 1979.

New Statesman, July 26, 1974.

Newsweek, April 19, 1971; July 23, 1973.

New Yorker, September 11, 1971; June 23, 1973; April 19, 1979.

New York Review of Books, December 13, 1973.

New York Times, November 21, 1978; May 23, 1980; March 4, 1982, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, review of Nobody's Angel; December 10, 1984; October 11, 1986; September 14, 1989.

New York Times Book Review, March 14, 1971; July 29, 1973; November 19, 1978, Richard Elman, review of Panama; October 19, 1980; February 8, 1981; March 7, 1982; December 16, 1984, Robert Roper, review of Something to Be Desired; September 24, 1989, Beverly Lowry, review of Keep the Change; September 13, 1992.

Observer, (London, England), January 24, 1993.

Partisan Review, fall, 1972.

People, September 17, 1979; November 3, 1980.

Prairie Schooner, summer, 1993.

Publishers Weekly, May 3, 1999, review of Some Horses, p. 59; November 8, 1999, review of The Longest Silence, p. 55; May 6, 2002, review of The Cadence of Grass, p. 35.

Rapport, January, 1993.

Saturday Review, March 27, 1971.

Spectator, July 13, 1974.

Time, August 6, 1973; June 30, 1980; November 2, 1992, John Skow, review of Nothing but Blue Skies.

Times Literary Supplement, May 24, 1985; January 29, 1993.

Village Voice, September 15, 1975; December 11, 1978, Gary L. Fisketjon, review of Panama.

Virginia Quarterly Review, spring, 1981.

Wall Street Journal, December 24, 1984, Ronald Varney, review of Something to Be Desired.

Washington Post, December 30, 1980; October 2, 1986.

Washington Post Book World, November 19, 1978; February 28, 1982; December 16, 1984.

World and I, September, 2002, Tom Pilkington, review of The Cadence of Grass.