McGuane, Thomas 1939- (Thomas Francis III McGuane)

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McGuane, Thomas 1939- (Thomas Francis III McGuane)

PERSONAL:

Born December 11, 1939, in Wyandotte, MI; son of Thomas Francis (a manufacturer) and Alice 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:

Office—Box 25, McLeod, MT 59052. Agent—Amanda Urban, International Creative Management, 40 W. 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 of 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 win 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), 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 (signed limited edition), Winn Books, 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 in Fishing, Knopf (New York, NY), 1999.

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

(With an introduction by Charles Lindsey) Upstream: Fly Fishing in the American West, with photographs by Charles Lindsey, Aperture (New York, NY), 2000.

Horses, with photographs by Jay Dusard, Rio Nuevo Publishers (Tucson, AZ), 2005.

Gallatin Canyon: Stories, Knopf (New York, NY), 2006.

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, according to Kay Bonetti in Conversations with American Novelists, "writes about brooding protagonists, displaced people, characters who cannot seem to put down roots or reach out to things beyond themselves. These characters are often ironically connected and shaped by their relationships to landscape and place." McGuane's fiction—some of which shares locales and sensibilities with that of Ernest Hemingway—brings an ironic twist to the plight of the modern American male. As Beverly Lowry wrote 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. 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 Piano and 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 abused drugs and alcohol and engaged in a number of affairs. 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. 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, and he again turned to drugs and alcohol.

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 and unfavorable criticism. 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." 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."

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. McGuane's new down-to-earth attitude carried over to his prose style, which became cleaner and less flashy. 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, the 1992 work 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."

In the mid-1990s McGuane published a number of essay collections, concentrating on environmental themes in such works as The Longest Silence: A Life in Fishing and Some Horses. The thirty-three essays in The Longest Silence concern the author's lifelong passion with the sport of angling, relating "the joys of tying flies and testing different rods, to sharing ghost stories and observational gems with fellow anglers, to absorbing quietly life's mysteries," remarked a critic in Publishers Weekly. Dennis Dodge, writing in Booklist, praised the work, citing the "masterfully precise quality of the prose," and Library Journal contributor Will Hepfer wrote that McGuane's pieces "are capable of capturing the reader's imagination with gifted prose." Some Horses collects nine essays in which McGuane "captures not only the essence of both human nature and horses but also how they reflect and complement each other," noted Fred Egloff in Booklist. According to a reviewer in Publishers Weekly, the work "resonates with horses' indelible spirit, sensitivity and individuality."

In 2002 McGuane published The Cadence of Grass, his first novel in a decade, "a fine, quirky, funny, startling" work, remarked Fred Grimm in the Miami Herald. When Sunny Jim Whitelaw, the owner of a Montana bottling plant, passes away, he bequeaths the business to his shiftless son-in-law, Paul Crusoe, who has just been released from prison. Whitelaw also stipulates in his will, however, that the cash-strapped plant cannot be sold until Paul reconciles with his estranged wife, Evelyn. To save the family from financial ruin, Evelyn's younger sister, Natalie, herself trapped in a failing marriage to Stuart, pleads with her sibling to halt her divorce proceedings. "McGuane tells this story of the fall, or at least slump, of the house of Whitelaw in his trademark style, a balladic ramble through the consciousnesses of" the main characters, noted a Publishers Weekly contributor, and a critic in Kirkus Reviews deemed the work "a small but satisfying story about crazies, their keepers, and their victims in his beloved and beguiling Montana."

Gallatin Canyon: Stories, published in 2006, contains ten tales that "depict desperate men well past their midlife crises," observed Edward B. St. John in Library Journal. McGuane "writes with particular intensity in these initially measured, then increasingly feverish, tales of odd encounters and doomed pairings," stated Booklist contributor Donna Seaman. According to New York Times Book Review critic Stephen Metcalf, "McGuane has become our poet-philosopher of the arm's length, of the prudently aborted intimacy that keeps both isolation and commitment equally at bay."

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 Hemingway 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, New York Times Book Review critic Thomas R. Edwards 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 similarly suggested 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 Albert Howard Carter III 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."

McGuane, observed Joseph J. Wydeven in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, "has mellowed with age but remains controversial, poised between contradictions and motivated by an understanding that life can never measure up to one's expectations. His work shifts between confrontation and withdrawal, the work ethic and social drift, responsibility and freedom." Wydeven added that the author's "novels deal with realistically flawed and error-prone protagonists who maintain rough-humored, energetic, and emotional contact with the world of real experience. McGuane's accounts of men and women responding to ‘sadness-for-no-reason,’ and their efforts to restore meaning to their lives, often through hard work, remain compelling."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Bonetti, Kay, editor, Conversations with American Novelists, University of Missouri Press (Columbia, MO), 1997.

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

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), Volume 2: American Novelists since World War II, 1978, Volume 212: Twentieth-Century American Western Writers, Second Series, 1999.

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 (Durango, CO), 1992.

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

PERIODICALS

America, May 15, 1971, review of The Bushwacked Piano, p. 522.

American Book Review, May-June, 1983, R.T. Smith, review of Nobody's Angel, p. 20.

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

Atlantic, September, 1973, review of Ninety-two in the Shade, p. 104.

Audubon, July, 2000, Christopher Camuto, "Art of the Wild," review of Upstream: Fly Fishing in the American West, p. 108.

Bloomsbury Review, July-August, 1993, Gregory McNamee, review of Nothing but Blue Skies, p. 14.

Booklist, June 1, 1999, Fred Egloff, review of Some Horses, p. 1760; September 1, 1999, Dennis Dodge, review of The Longest Silence: A Life in Fishing, p. 61; March 15, 2002, Brad Hooper, review of The Cadence of Grass, p. 1189; May 1, 2006, Donna Seaman, review of Gallatin Canyon: Stories, p. 72.

Chicago Tribune Books, October 14, 1990, review of An Outside Chance, p. 7.

Commonweal, October 26, 1973, review of Ninety-two in the Shade, p. 92.

Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction, August, 1975, reviews of Ninety-two in the Shade, The Bushwacked Piano, and The Sporting Club, p. 91.

Entertainment Weekly, July 30, 1999, Vanessa V. Friedman, review of Some Horses, p. 66; May 10, 2002, Daniel Fierman, review of The Cadence of Grass, p. 74.

Esquire, July, 2002, Scott Raab, "Esquire's Big Bad Book of the Month," review of The Cadence of Grass, p. 22.

Fiction International, fall-winter, 1975, Albert Howard Carter III, "An Interview with Thomas McGuane," pp. 50-62, and Larry McCaffrey, "Thomas McGuane: On Turning Nothing into Something," pp. 123-129.

Globe & Mail (Toronto, Canada), July 15, 2006, Ray Robertson, "Sure, It's Good, but What We Really Want Is Great," review of Gallatin Canyon, p. D10.

Kirkus Reviews, March 15, 2002, review of The Cadence of Grass, p. 361; June 1, 2006, review of Gallatin Canyon, p. 539.

Library Journal, May 15, 1999, Deborah Emerson, review of Some Horses, 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; April 15, 2006, Edward B. St. John, review of Gallatin Canyon, p. 69.

Miami Herald, May 10, 2002, Fred Grimm, review of The Cadence of Grass.

New Yorker, September 11, 1971, review of The Bushwhacked Piano, p. 124; June 23, 1973, review of Ninety-two in the Shade, p. 88; April 19, 1979, Susan Lardner, review of Panama.

New York Times, December 5, 1982, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, review of Nobody's Angel, p. 46; December 10, 1984, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, review of Something to Be Desired, p. C16; September 14, 1989, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, review of Keep the Change, p. B2; September 29, 1992, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, review of Nothing but Blue Skies, p. B3; May 21, 2002, Dinitia Smith, "A Man of Many Faults Amid Montana's Majesty," review of The Cadence of Grass, p. E7.

New York Times Book Review, March 14, 1971, review of The Bushwhacked Piano, p. 6; July 29, 1973, Thomas R. Edwards, review of Ninety-two in the Shade, p. 1; November 19, 1978, Richard Elman, review of Panama, p. 34; February 8, 1981, Vance Nye Bourjaily, "An Outside Chance," p. 11; March 7, 1982, Vance Nye Bourjaily, review of Nobody's Angel, p. 9; December 16, 1984, Robert Roper, review of Something to Be Desired, p. 11; September 24, 1989, Beverly Lowry, review of Keep the Change, p. 3; September 13, 1992, Jay Parini, review of Nothing but Blue Skies, p. 7; December 8, 2002, review of The Cadence of Grass, p. 61; September 3, 2006, Stephen Metcalf, review of Gallatin Canyon.

People, November 17, 1986, Campbell Geeslin, review of To Skin a Cat, p. 21.

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; April 10, 2006, review of Gallatin Canyon, p. 41.

Time, November 2, 1992, John Skow, review of Nothing but Blue Skies.

Village Voice, December 11, 1978, Gary L. Fisketjon, review of Panama.

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

Washington Post Book World, November 19, 1978, Jonathan Yardley, review of Panama, p. E1; December 16, 1984, Garrett Epps, review of Something to Be Desired, p. 10.

World and I, September, 2002, Tom Pilkington, "A Long Montana Winter—Thomas McGuane Returns with a Tale of the Old and New West," review of The Cadence of Grass.