After a decade of Donald Trump’s chaos and cruelty, we might ask how literary fiction is responding. Readers, for their part, flocked to journalistic and historical explainers in Trump 1.0, then classics during the pandemic, followed by escapist genre fare and comfort reads in Trump’s second term. Writers attempting to capture the new now have met the Diet Coked-out American berserk in kind, as with the Rabelaisian excess of Tony Tulathimutte’s Rejection and Mark Doten’s Trump Sky Alpha. Other novelists have turned to acidic, class-conscious portraits of the underemployed—see Andrew Martin and Halle Butler. A third group embraced allegory, turning to history (Zadie Smith’s The Fraud) and the supernatural (George Saunders’s Vigil).
This work is excellent. Some, masterful. It also firmly operates within the political sphere of its reception: By the left, of the left, for the left. What of the writers living in red-state America? Are any of them capturing its denizens with a compassion their subjects can’t themselves reciprocate? And, while we’re at it, doing so with a voice that counters MAGA hyperbole with plainspoken wryness?
You can guess the answer, given the subhead above. The short fiction of octogenarian Thomas McGuane, as seen in his most recent collection A Wooded Shore, is quite possibly the most vital literature of the Trump era. And despite his accolades, he’s underrated and certainly underread.
His readers would disagree. (To know him is to love him.) For the past half-century he’s steadily produced novels, stories, and nonfiction—primarily about horses and fishing—with garlands sprinkled throughout. His third novel Ninety-Two in the Shade was a finalist for the National Book Award; fans say its baroque intelligence and post-hippie hangover were too real for the judges.
McGuane had remunerative dalliances with ’70s Hollywood, selling screenplays and hobnobbing with the inebriate tranche of the A-list. Plus the actual dalliances of the Arthur Miller-Marilyn Monroe variety. His first wife later married Peter Fonda; his second was Superman actress Margot Kidder; his third is the sister of the late Jimmy Buffett.
McGuane turned to short fiction relatively late in his career, and, like Donald Antrim, seemed preternaturally suited to it. Or perhaps he just loves a challenge. He’s said writing a story is “like trying to start a fire in the rain.” Upon the publication of his career-spanning Cloudbursts, the New York Times called him “a master of the short story.”
Chalk it up to stubbornness. McGuane is as committed to his vision as his characters are to theirs.
Eight years later, the man once nicknamed Captain Berserko is now more admired than read. Perhaps that red-state geography’s to blame. McGuane lives on a ranch in Big Sky Country—”out in the boonies, two miles from a town of six” (link)—anomalous within publishing’s bicoastal affinities. His fiction is mostly set in rural Montana and Florida, and in small towns where time moves slowly. Grudges outnumber people. This is the “sunburnt otherwhere,” per Auden, easily exoticized by readers of The New Yorker and The Paris Review, where much of his new collection first appeared. (Rest assured there’s none of Taylor Sheridan’s mansplayed mise en scène, nor the myopic faux-revanchism.)
Still, there’s something packaged about how we see McGuane. Echoes of Cormac McCarthy, circa All The Pretty Horses. Last year’s Atlantic profile called McGuane “the last of his kind,” accompanied by a photo of the man fly fishing knee-deep in a riverine idyll. Look up and you’ll see Papa Hemingway in the clouds, saluting with a bottle of Ballantine.
Of course, Hemingway and McCarthy weren’t writing amid democratic backsliding and historic polarization. And really, who wants to read about GOP-voting Boomers trying to reckon with their blind spots? Life’s difficult enough. Give us the balm of historical fiction. Of improbable serial killers and time-traveling tradwives. Of people fucking atop dragons.
McGuane’s aim, however successful, may be self-defeating. Part of the brilliance of A Wooded Shore is its implicit acknowledgement that the America it depicts occludes much of a readership. Chalk it up to stubbornness. McGuane is as committed to his vision as his characters are to theirs. There’s a line in “Motherlode,” from Cloudbursts, about a man jumping headlong into danger: “He declined to be swayed by second thoughts.” It could be tattooed on every one of his characters.
At the end of “Slant Six,” from the new book, a couple is driving home from a party hosted by wealthy acquaintances. The husband made multiple passes at the hostess for reasons unclear even to himself. He presumes his wife hasn’t noticed. He mentions the hosts’ brusqueness with each other, and asks, “Do you suppose that’s who we are?” She doesn’t reply. It’s about as close to epiphany as McGuane will grant.
Or consider “Wide Spot,” where a middling politician is doing a get-out-the-vote tour of his constituency in Montana. We intuit his competency and level of commitment from his aerial view of local issues: “Lately, the combination of agriculture and local mining had made Prairiedale a politically divided town. I decided to visit my half of the divide as part of my sweep—and just to feel the sweet ache of old days (mine) gone by.” He’s nostalgic for his old rock band and wants to reconnect with the singer Micah Clardy. The one-tavern town is beyond moribund. Someone’s thrown a taxidermied vulture into the bushes of the local bank.
The narrator assumes his gift for retail politics will charm his old friend; Micah laughs in his face. There’s some awkwardness, and our protagonist makes to leave. He thinks about Micah’s luck with women when they were young, and decides to pay a social call on Micah’s fetching adult daughter. It goes about as well as you’d expect. Micah curses him as “the perfect politician.” Our unflappable narrator is too habituated to allow the inward-facing mask to slip, and the story ends with the deluded affirmations of every Trump appointee: “You never know what’s next, and that is why I can say with all honesty that I am not a depressed person. Unlike Mr. Fixit, I have a future and I don’t intend to fade.”
As for the sitting president, he’s named just once, in the opening line of the titular novella.
To understand how widower Fred Latham ended up late in life living aboard a Trumpy yacht at the Capital Yacht Club on the Potomac, a yacht where John F. Kennedy slept with friends, employees, boarding-school jailbait, and the future Mrs. Onassis, picture a small white cabin cruiser of uncertain vintage as it pushes its way up a small tributary of a great lake whose slow current glistens between low banks.
The sentence is pure late McGuane. Wit inflects the voice without subsuming it, which in turn gives the anecdote a touch of authentic eavesdrop. We leap nimbly across decades and administrations, from trysts to matrimony, to alight on Jackie O., a name full of glamour and portent. (Fred Latham’s own story is rife with marital rupture.) Meanwhile, DJT doesn’t earn his own noun, unlike the stars of Camelot. Trump is adjective, and, indeed, adjectival: more atmosphere than object. The toxic airborne event has become permanently bad weather.
Note too the line’s syntactic wonder. The alliterative l’s and consonant i’s of “late in life living” crash into the repetition of “yacht”—a word which sounds bilious and oxymoronic to its high-class connotations. And like Trump, Latham’s vessel is more boast than reality, less oceangoing luxury than river-bound “cabin cruiser of uncertain vintage.” A “small” fish in a big pond, literally and figuratively.
McGuane’s subtle wonders work because of their brief length.
Latham is a familiar McGuane type: A white man who clings to his self-conception at the expense of self-awareness. In the stories, comeuppance often arrives for half-forgotten past transgressions. McGuane favors karmic symmetry; he titled one story “Take Half, Leave Half.”
There are a handful of masterpieces in the book, though the novella is too uneven to qualify. It’s a generational take on the arbitrariness of family: How two people who shouldn’t even date eventually marry, and how their children suspect they were given the wrong parents. McGuane extends care to the ignored and the abhorrent—Peggy, the matriarch, fails at protecting her daughter not once but twice, with lifelong consequences the family all but ignores. The effects are so poisonous as to be nearly anti-natalist.
“Thataway,” on the other hand, should be anthologized for decades to come. It’s another story of adult siblings at odds with their upbringing; staying local is a common morbidity in McGuane’s fiction. (He told The Believer, “Life consists of escape.”)
The story opens in a “windblown prairie town” as sisters Mildred and Constance Parrott wile away their codependent retirement in their childhood home. They fantasize about a reunion with their brother Cooper, who decamped for LA decades ago for minor fame in Westerns and entrepreneurial success in furniture stores. His helicopter sports an illustration of Cooper mid-lasso.
Mildred dies on page two, setting things in motion. “The minute Constance realized what had happened she was surprised by the feeling of envy that came over her.” She’s burdened with funeral arrangements and a new roommate: Mildred’s adopted son Wayne, who prefers to eat fast food alone in his truck.
Meanwhile, Cooper is in Palm Springs, ducking the Better Business Bureau and reluctantly participating in his daughter’s documentary about his upbringing. He wants to talk about his days as an “old-time cinema cowpoke,” but Bonny’s aiming for the low-hanging fruit of paternal hypocrisy. She convinces Cooper to visit Constance.
Nearly everyone safeguards their former glory, earned or not. Constance negotiates her sister’s cremation with an undertaker who was “runner-up Miss Big Sky,” and who sits below her framed pageant photo. Cooper once played in a band with one of Constance’s husbands, but was relegated to the tambourine. His fortune is built on fake going-out-of-business sales.
And yet the past insists upon itself. Mildred’s ashes become a hot potato passed between characters. Bonny orchestrates a one-car parade for Cooper that’s half return of the prodigal, half humiliation ritual. An old acquaintance is upset that Cooper doesn’t remember him: “Our family took you in when the whole lot of yiz didn’t have a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out.” There’s an altercation. Bonny asks her father if he was ever homeless. He replies, “Not always,” and she thinks, “Something about the way he said it told her it would be very strong during editing.”
Soon Cooper has had enough. He returns to Palm Springs. Constance tires of Wayne’s antics and sells the house. Bonny abandons her film, recognizing how its obscuring her filial understanding. The story ends with Constance arriving on Cooper’s doorstep, bags in tow: “I have arrived! Is it a problem?”
The reader might cast Bonny as a cosseted Millennial, or perhaps analogous to those East Coast journalists hectoring Iowans in diners during the caucuses. They might see Cooper and Constance as more comic than nuanced, like something out of a Coen Brothers movie. But “Thataway,” like most of the book, is both subterranean and unshakeable.
McGuane’s subtle wonders work because of their brief length. Novelists in the Trump era combat the daily sturm und drang with extended responses defined by their reach and, at times, their inability to grasp. The novel must develop; nobody wants 250 pages of stasis.
The MAGA faithful, on the other hand, take pride in their intractability. In McGuane’s hands, this other “half of the divide” become ideal subjects for the short story. His characters confront moments of reckoning—some comic, others karmic, often both—where self-belief collides with a buckling status quo.
Which might make A Wooded Shore terribly outré at a time of incipient fascism. (As outré as using the word outré.) But if we engage with McGuane on his terms, our engagement with fiction will extend both our reach and our grasp. What else is a literature for?
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