After a decade defined by the political chaos, polarization, and cultural shifts of the Donald Trump era, literary fiction has struggled to find a steady footing when addressing the contemporary American landscape. During the first Trump administration, readers flocked in droves to journalistic and historical explainers. As the COVID-19 pandemic swept the globe, comfort was found in timeless classics, which soon gave way to escapist genre fare and comfort reads as the political climate settled into a bitter, permanent second term. <\/p>\n
Novelists attempting to capture the texture of the "new now" have often met the Diet Coke-fueled American berserk in kind. Authors have leaned into Rabelaisian excess, as seen in Tony Tulathimutte\u2019s Rejection<\/em> and Mark Doten\u2019s Trump Sky Alpha<\/em>. Others have turned their gaze toward acidic, class-conscious portraits of the underemployed, exemplified by the works of Andrew Martin and Halle Butler. A third distinct group of writers has embraced allegory, retreating either into history, as Zadie Smith did in The Fraud<\/em>, or exploring the supernatural, as George Saunders did in Vigil<\/em>.<\/p>\n This work has undoubtedly been exceptional, and at times, downright masterful. Yet, it largely operates within a specific political sphere of reception: written by the left, of the left, and for the left. This dynamic leaves open a crucial question about the contemporary literary landscape: What of the writers living in red-state America? Are any of them capturing its denizens with a genuine compassion that their subjects cannot themselves reciprocate? And while doing so, can they manage a voice that counters MAGA hyperbole with plainspoken wryness?<\/p>\n The short fiction of octogenarian writer Thomas McGuane, showcased in his most recent collection A Wooded Shore<\/em>, provides a compelling answer. Quietly and brilliantly, McGuane\u2019s work stands as arguably the most vital literature of the Trump era. Despite his extensive accolades, he remains vastly underrated and unquestionably underread outside of dedicated literary circles.<\/p>\n His devoted readership would vehemently disagree with that assessment, holding the view that to know McGuane is to love him. For the past half-century, he has steadily produced novels, stories, and nonfiction\u2014primarily concerning his enduring passions of horses and fishing\u2014accumulating prestigious literary garlands along the way. His third novel, Ninety-Two in the Shade<\/em>, earned a finalist spot for the National Book Award, with fans noting that its baroque intelligence and post-hippie hangover were perhaps a bit too real for the judges of the era.<\/p>\n During the 1970s, McGuane also enjoyed remunerative dalliances with Hollywood, selling screenplays and hobnobbing with the inebriate tranche of the A-list. His personal life mirrored the era\u2019s bohemian glamour, featuring relationships of the Arthur Miller-Marilyn Monroe variety. His first wife later married Peter Fonda; his second was Superman<\/em> actress Margot Kidder; and his third is the sister of the late singer Jimmy Buffett.<\/p>\n McGuaneturned to short fiction relatively late in his career, proving himself preternaturally suited to the format, much like Donald Antrim. Perhaps it was simply a matter of relishing a creative challenge. McGuane has famously described writing a short story as \u201clike trying to start a fire in the rain.\u201d Upon the publication of his career-spanning collection Cloudbursts<\/em>, The New York Times<\/em> hailed him as \u201ca master of the short story.\u201d<\/p>\n One can chalk it up to pure stubbornness. McGuane is as fiercely committed to his artistic vision as his stubborn characters are to theirs. <\/p>\n Eight years after a critic once nicknamed him "Captain Berserko," the writer is far more admired than he is actively read. Perhaps his red-state geography is partly to blame for this oversight. McGuane lives on a ranch in Big Sky Country\u2014describing his home as being \u201cout in the boonies, two miles from a town of six\u201d\u2014an existence entirely anomalous within the bicoastal affinities of the mainstream publishing industry. His fiction is predominantly set in rural Montana, Florida, and small towns where time appears to move at a glacial pace, and where local grudges vastly outnumber the human population. <\/p>\n This is the \u201csunburnt otherwhere\u201d described by W.H. Auden, a region easily exoticized by readers of The New Yorker<\/em> and The Paris Review<\/em>, where much of his new collection first appeared. Rest assured, however, that McGuane’s work contains none of Taylor Sheridan\u2019s hyper-masculine mise en sc\u00e8ne<\/em>, nor any of its myopic faux-revanchism.<\/p>\n Even so, there remains a tendency to package how we view McGuane, often drawing easy echoes to Cormac McCarthy circa All The Pretty Horses<\/em>. A profile published last year in The Atlantic<\/em> dubbed McGuane \u201cthe last of his kind,\u201d accompanied by a picturesque photograph of the author fly fishing knee-deep in a riverine idyll. Look closely enough at the cultural mythmaking, and you can practically see Ernest Hemingway up in the clouds, saluting the author with a bottle of Ballantine.<\/p>\n Of course, Hemingway and McCarthy were not writing amid an era of democratic backsliding and historic political polarization. And realistically, who truly wants to read about GOP-voting Boomers attempting to reckon with their own blind spots? Life is difficult enough as it is; many prefer the balm of historical fiction, improbable serial killers, time-traveling tradwives, or people riding atop dragons.<\/p>\n McGuane\u2019s literary aim, however successful, may ultimately be self-defeating. Part of the brilliance of A Wooded Shore<\/em> lies in its implicit acknowledgment that the America it depicts inherently occludes much of a contemporary readership. Again, chalk it up to stubbornness. There is a line in \u201cMotherlode,\u201d a story from his collection Cloudbursts<\/em>, about a man jumping headlong into danger: \u201cHe declined to be swayed by second thoughts.\u201d That sentiment could easily be tattooed onto every single one of his characters.<\/p>\n Consider the end of \u201cSlant Six\u201d from his newest book, where a married couple drives home from a party hosted by wealthy acquaintances. The husband has made multiple passes at the hostess for reasons that remain unclear even to himself, yet he fatuously presumes his wife hasn’t noticed. Mentioning the hosts\u2019 internal brusqueness toward one another, he asks his wife, \u201cDo you suppose that\u2019s who we are?\u201d She offers no reply. It is about as close to an epiphany as McGuane is ever willing to grant his creations.<\/p>\n Or consider the story \u201cWide Spot,\u201d which follows a middling politician conducting a get-out-the-vote tour of his constituency in Montana. Readers quickly intuit his competency and level of commitment from his aerial view of local issues: \u201cLately, 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\u2014and just to feel the sweet ache of old days (mine) gone by.\u201d Nostalgic for his old rock band, he hopes to reconnect with the singer Micah Clardy. The one-tavern town is beyond moribund; at one point, someone has thrown a taxidermied vulture into the bushes of the local bank.<\/p>\n The narrator assumes his practiced gift for retail politics will charm his old friend, but Micah instead laughs directly in his face. Following an awkward exchange, our protagonist prepares to leave, thinking back on Micah\u2019s past luck with women when they were young, and decides to pay a social call on Micah\u2019s fetching adult daughter. Predictably, it goes about as well as one might expect. Micah curses him out as \u201cthe perfect politician.\u201d Yet, our unflappable narrator is far too habituated to let his inward-facing mask slip, and the story concludes with the deluded affirmations typical of modern political operatives: \u201cYou never know what\u2019s 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\u2019t intend to fade.\u201d<\/p>\n As for the sitting president, Donald Trump is named just once, appearing in the opening line of the book’s titular novella. <\/p>\n To understand how a widower named Fred Latham ended up living late in life aboard a Trumpy yacht at the Capital Yacht Club on the Potomac\u2014a yacht where John F. Kennedy once slept with friends, employees, and boarding-school companions\u2014one must picture a small white cabin cruiser of uncertain vintage pushing its way up a small tributary of a great lake whose slow current glistens between low banks.<\/p>\n The sentence is pure, late-career McGuane. Wit subtly inflects the narrative voice without ever subsuming it, lending the anecdote the authentic feel of an overheard conversation. The prose leaps nimbly across decades and political administrations, moving from romantic trysts to matrimony, before finally alighting on Jackie O.\u2014a name dripping with glamour and portent. (Fred Latham\u2019s own personal story is similarly rife with marital rupture.) Meanwhile, Donald Trump does not earn his own noun, unlike the stars of Camelot. Trump functions as an adjective, adjectival in nature: more an ambient atmosphere than a tangible object. The toxic airborne event has effectively become permanent bad weather.<\/p>\n Notice, too, the syntactic wonder of the line. The alliterative Ls and consonant Is of \u201clate in life living\u201d crash directly into the repetition of the word \u201cyacht\u201d\u2014a term that sounds bilious and oxymoronic given its high-class connotations. Much like Trump himself, Latham\u2019s vessel is more boast than reality, standing as less of an oceangoing luxury and more of a river-bound \u201ccabin cruiser of uncertain vintage.\u201d He is a small fish in a big pond, both literally and figuratively.<\/p>\n Latham is a familiar McGuane archetype: a white man who desperately clings to his self-conception entirely at the expense of genuine self-awareness. Throughout these stories, comeuppance frequently arrives in the wake of half-forgotten past transgressions. McGuane harbors a distinct fondness for karmic symmetry; he once titled a story \u201cTake Half, Leave Half.\u201d<\/p>\n While the collection features a handful of absolute masterpieces, the titular novella itself is somewhat too uneven to qualify. It serves as a generational exploration of the arbitrariness of family\u2014examining how two people who have no business dating eventually marry, and how their children grow up suspecting they were given the wrong parents. McGuane extends a profound measure of care to the ignored and the abhorrent; in the story, the matriarch Peggy fails to protect her daughter not once, but twice, resulting in lifelong consequences that the family largely ignores. The resulting emotional effects are so poisonous as to be nearly anti-natalist.<\/p>\n By contrast, the story \u201cThataway\u201d is destined to be anthologized for decades to come. It is another tale of adult siblings fundamentally at odds with their upbringing, exploring the local stasis that serves as a common morbidity in McGuane\u2019s fiction. (As he once told The Believer<\/em>, \u201cLife consists of escape.\u201d)<\/p>\n The story opens in a windblown prairie town as sisters Mildred and Constance Parrott wile away their codependent retirement in their childhood home, fantasizing about a potential reunion with their brother Cooper, who decamped for Los Angeles decades earlier to find minor fame in Westerns and entrepreneurial success in furniture stores. His helicopter famously sports an illustration of Cooper mid-lasso.<\/p>\n Mildred dies on page two, setting the plot in motion. \u201cThe minute Constance realized what had happened she was surprised by the feeling of envy that came over her.\u201d Suddenly, she finds herself burdened with funeral arrangements and an unexpected new roommate: Mildred\u2019s adopted son Wayne, who prefers to eat fast food alone in his truck.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, Cooper is down in Palm Springs, ducking the Better Business Bureau and reluctantly participating in a documentary being filmed by his daughter about his upbringing. While Cooper wants to focus on his days as an old-time cinema cowpoke, his daughter Bonny aims for the low-hanging fruit of paternal hypocrisy, eventually convincing Cooper to visit Constance.<\/p>\n Nearly all of the characters fiercely safeguard their former glory, whether genuinely earned or entirely illusory. Constance negotiates her sister\u2019s cremation with an undertaker who happens to be a runner-up Miss Big Sky, sitting directly beneath her framed pageant photograph. Cooper once played in a band with one of Constance\u2019s former husbands, though he was permanently relegated to playing the tambourine, and his current fortune is built entirely on fake going-out-of-business sales.<\/p>\n Yet the past stubbornly insists upon itself. Mildred\u2019s ashes become a metaphorical hot potato passed awkwardly between characters. Bonny orchestrates a one-car parade for Cooper that functions half as the return of the prodigal son and half as a public humiliation ritual. An old acquaintance becomes visibly upset when Cooper fails to remember him: \u201cOur family took you in when the whole lot of yiz didn\u2019t have a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out.\u201d An altercation ensues, prompting Bonny to ask her father if he was ever truly homeless. He replies, \u201cNot always,\u201d leading her to think, \u201cSomething about the way he said it told her it would be very strong during editing.\u201d<\/p>\n Before long, Cooper has had enough and retreats to Palm Springs. Constance similarly grows tired of Wayne\u2019s antics and sells the house, while Bonny abandons her documentary project after recognizing how it is actively obscuring her filial understanding. The story draws to a close with Constance arriving unexpectedly on Cooper\u2019s doorstep, bags in tow, announcing, \u201cI have arrived! Is it a problem?\u201d<\/p>\n While a reader might cast Bonny as a cosseted millennial, or view her as analogous to East Coast journalists hectoring voters in rural diners, or see Cooper and Constance as more comic than nuanced\u2014perhaps reminiscent of characters from a Coen Brothers film\u2014\u201cThataway,\u201d like the rest of the book, remains both subterranean and unshakeable.<\/p>\n McGuane\u2019s subtle literary wonders succeed precisely because of their brief length. Novelists in the Trump era often combat daily political turmoil with extended narratives defined by sprawling reach and, at times, a distinct inability to grasp the full picture. A novel must develop; very few readers want 250 pages of pure stasis.<\/p>\n The MAGA faithful, on the other hand, frequently take pride in their intractability. In McGuane\u2019s hands, this other half of the political divide transforms into ideal subject matter for the short story format. His characters repeatedly confront moments of reckoning\u2014some comic, others karmic, and frequently a combination of both\u2014where unyielding self-belief violently collides with a buckling status quo.<\/p>\n All of this might make A Wooded Shore<\/em> feel terribly outr\u00e9 at a time of incipient fascism. But if readers are willing to engage with Thomas McGuane strictly on his own terms, their engagement with fiction will successfully extend both their reach and their grasp. After all, what else is literature truly for?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" After a decade defined by the political chaos, polarization, and cultural shifts of the Donald Trump era, literary fiction has struggled to find a steady footing when addressing the contemporary American landscape. During the first Trump administration, readers flocked in droves to journalistic and historical explainers. As the COVID-19 pandemic swept the globe, comfort was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1853,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[286],"tags":[51,287,3474,288,3473,3471,702,289,230,3472,117,3469,3470,2133],"class_list":["post-1854","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-books-and-literature","tag-america","tag-books","tag-capturing","tag-literature","tag-mcguane","tag-octogenarian","tag-quietly","tag-reading","tag-rural","tag-thomas","tag-trump","tag-unsung","tag-voice","tag-writer"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/xesi.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1854","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/xesi.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/xesi.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xesi.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xesi.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1854"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/xesi.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1854\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xesi.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1853"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/xesi.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1854"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xesi.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1854"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xesi.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1854"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}