Nobody's Angel Thomas Mcguane

Introduction

Thomas McGuane was born in Wyandotte, Michigan, and received a B.A. degree from Michigan State University in 1962 and an M.F.A. from the Yale School of Drama in 1975, after which he was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford. Giving up the idea of an academic career, he concentrated on writing novels and screenplays. Ninety-two in the Shade (1973) is among his best and most characteristic works. The novel centers on ThomasSkelton, who pursues his desire to be a fishing guide in the face of a woman's vow to kill him if he continues to work on the land she considers hers. Skelton's determination to act according to his own values, even though he risks his life in doing so, is typical ofMcGuane's skill at portraying characters who pursue their own dreams at great risk (Morris, pp. 180-89). Much of McGuane's fiction is set in the West.Nobody's Angel (1982), for example, explores Deadrock, Montana, a listless environment of farmers and cowboys where Patrick Fitzpatrick wrestles with a stymied life on his family's ranch after an intense period in the tank corps of the army. McGuane's otherprotagonists confront similar challenges: how to cope with conventional life when the more-romanticized versions of the West and of the past elude the characters' grasp. McGuane's other novels include The Sporting Club (1969), The Bushwhacked Piano(1971), Panama (1978), Something to Be Desired (1984), Keep the Change (1989), Nothing but Blue Skies (1992), The Cadence of Grass (2002), and Driving on the Rim (2010). In her review ofDriving on the Rim for The New York Times, Maile Meloy wrote that the "rambling plot" of the picaresque novel is "sustained because the individual episodes are a pleasure, often farcical and always acutely observed, and because the hero is sympathetic in his dissociated journey."

McGuane has also had a significant career as a screenwriter with92 in the Shade (1975), Rancho DeLuxe (1975), The Missouri Breaks (1976), and Tom Horn (1980). His short fiction has been collected in To Skin a Cat (1986). Gallatin Canyon: Stories was published in 2006. His nonfiction includes An Outside Chance: Essays on Sport (1980), The Longest Silence: A Life in Fishing(1999), and Some Horses (1999) (Lynda, pp. 12-24).

Discussion

Thomas McGuane's (1939-) Deadrock, Montana, which first appears in his novel Nobody's Angel (1982) and reappears in such novels as Something to Be Desired (1984) and Nothing But Blue Skies (1992). A Michigan native, McGuane's novels have varied in setting from his home state in The Sporting Club (1969) to the Florida Keys in Ninety-two in the Shade (1973), but his later novels, stories, and essays speak to his adoptive state (he raises cattle and horses on his 2,500-acre ranch near Livingston, Montana) (Klinkowitz, pp. 118-139).

McGuane's career has led him in various directions, including work as a screenwriter on such films as Rancho Deluxe (1975),Missouri Breaks (1976), and Tom Horn (1980). “In essence,” writes Dexter Westrum, “McGuane depicts the West's inability to fulfill its own frontier myths.” His recent books include thirty-three essays, sometimes meditative, sometimes humorous, on angling from the Florida Keys and Ireland to Montana, published as The Longest Silence: A Life in Fishing (1999), and his ninth novel, The Cadence of Grass (2002), which has been described as “wildly unsettling,” “quirky,” “complex and dark,” and “a masterpiece of savage comedy.” Reviews have remained mixed, however, throughout McGuane's career, and if some have celebrated his unrelenting comedy, others have complained of ...