|
|
 |
|
|
|
 |
 |
 |
|
Thomas McGuane is the author of several highly
acclaimed novels, including The Sporting Club; The
Bushwacked Piano, which won the Richard and Hinda
Rosenthal Award of the American Academy and
Institute of Arts and Letters, Ninety-Two in the
Shade, which was nominated for the National Book
Award; Panama; Nobody's Angel; Something to be
Desired; Keep the Change; and Nothing
But Blue Skies. He has also written To Skin a
Cat, a collection of short stories; An Outside
Chance and Some Horses, collections of essays on
sport and horsemanship, respectively; and The
Longest Silence: A Life in Fishing. His books have been
published in ten languages. He was born in Michigan
and educated at Michigan State University, earned a
Master of Fine Arts degree at Yale School of Drama
and was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford. An
ardent conservationist, he is a director of
American Rivers and of the Craighead
Wildlife-Wildlands Institute. He lives with his
family on a 10,000-acre ranch in Sweet Grass County, Montana.
"One of this country's most important literary writers, whose stylish
prose-a heady combination of laconicism and hard-boiled baroque-has been
compared to such American sensibilities as Hemingway and Faulkner."
-- Los Angeles Herald-Examiner
"A writer of the first magnitude. His sheer writing skill is
nothing short of amazing. The preternatural force, grace, and
self-control of his prose recall Faulkner.... McGuane is a virtuoso." --
Jonathan Yardley, The New York Times Book Review
"McGuane shares with Celine a genius for seeing the profuse, disparate
materials of everyday life as a highly organized nightmare." -- The
New Yorker
"Thomas McGuane can only be imitated. There's no one else around who
comes close enough for comparison." -- William Hjortsberg
Photo (c) Kurt Markus
|
|
|
|
|
|
In his first novel since his best-selling Nothing but Blue Skies, and thirty-three years after The Sporting Club established his reputation, Thomas McGuane’s trademark combination of high wit, low behavior, and hard-won wisdom has never been on sharper—or, ultimately, more moving—display. This is the story of the Whitelaws, a family whose values are as far-flung as the territory they helped settle, and whose most recent generations have pioneered the landscape of dysfunction.
The patriarch, Sunny Jim, exerts his perverse control even posthumously, by means of a last will and testament that binds the family fortune (a bottling franchise) to a marriage that ought, by general assent, to be rent asunder. The charms of this particular son-in-law, lately released from prison, are potent if short-lived; Evelyn Whitelaw, his estranged wife, is quite literally bedeviled by them. And as her mother and sister court this twisted inheritance, her own yearnings point toward a way of life once habitual on these western plains but now embodied only by Bill Champion, the family’s ranch foreman and Evelyn’s one true compass.
A novel charged with the relentless and often contradictory claims of blood, money, history, and love, The Cadence of Grass is at once a masterpiece of savage comedy and an elegy for what has been lost. Long one of our most compelling novelists, Thomas McGuane has written the most ambitious book of his singularly distinguished career.
|
|
|
|
|
|
