Crow Fair: Stories, by Thomas McGuane
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Crow Fair: Stories, by Thomas McGuane
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From one of our most deeply admired storytellers, author of the richly acclaimed Gallatin Canyon, his first collection in nine years.Set in Thomas McGuane’s accustomed Big Sky country, with its mesmeric powers, these stories attest to the generous compass of his fellow feeling, as well as to his unique way with words and the comic genius that has inspired comparison with Twain and Gogol. The ties of family make for uncomfortable binds: A devoted son is horrified to discover his mother’s antics before she slipped into dementia. A father’s outdoor skills are no match for an ominous change in the weather. But complications arise equally in the absence of blood, as when lifelong friends on a fishing trip finally confront their deep dislike for each other. Or when a gifted traveling cattle breeder succumbs to the lure of a stranger’s offer of easy money. McGuane is as witty and large-hearted as we have ever known him—a jubilant, thunderous confirmation of his status as a modern master.
Crow Fair: Stories, by Thomas McGuane - Amazon Sales Rank: #290319 in Books
- Brand: McGuane, Thomas
- Published on: 2015-03-03
- Released on: 2015-03-03
- Format: Deckle Edge
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.54" h x 1.11" w x 6.08" l, 1.06 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 288 pages
Features
- 2015 collection of slhort stories, first collection by Thomas McGuane in 9 years
Crow Fair: Stories, by Thomas McGuane Review “Mysterious and illuminating . . . [McGuane] alternately pounds, kneads, works and reworks his material, shedding his tears into it and wrenching away, peeling and scraping it off his hands in a fruitless attempt to escape; then, wretched but indefatigable, going back to knead it again. This obsessive labor seems to change the molecular structure of the substance, from clay to a kind of porcelain . . . [McGuane] has honed a kind of bluff Western comedy of masculinity [and] turns muck into art, which takes wing in flights of ingenuity.”—Atticus Lish, The New York Times Book Review “Dazzling . . . McGuane rustles up some of his best stories yet . . . [and] continues to burnish his reputation with some of his most accomplished fiction to date.”—O Magazine “One of McGuane’s great gifts is the ability to elicit laughter in dark moments or to jolt the reader of an ostensibly comic tale with a knife twist of pathos or tragedy . . . the only thing [the reader] can expect is to be surprised – by McGuane’s deadpan wit, his hyperactive imagination, and his deep appreciation for the human comedy . . . [Crow Fair] serves not merely to make us gape or laugh at man’s essential weirdness but also to recognize a bit of it in ourselves.”—Stefan Beck, The Christian Science Monitor“McGuane has both honed the edge of his already sharp tone and, paradoxically, become more sympathetic to the human condition . . . [he] gives us well-rounded women alongside the men, making for a rich and fascinating portrait of Montana — with hungry bears and fighting trout as wonderful extras.” —Alan Cheuse, NPR“McGuane’s Montana retains wistful and ironic echoes of the Old West . . . with imagery as sparse and striking as the landscape . . . [These] stories highlight the detachment of young from old, husband from wife, neighbor from neighbor, the dying from life itself . . . [through] many funny, sad, and awful, awfully human moments.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) “Glum, gleeful, brilliant . . . McGuane’s stories are about the wacked-out order men and women assign to things, but it’s not the true order and merely contributes to a larger confusion that is not far from horror . . . Backdoor irony, you might call it, mixed with black humor.” —John Mort, Booklist (starred review) “A slyly cutting batch of tales from a contemporary master . . . Seventeen stories, straightforward but well-crafted, that cement McGuane’s reputation as the finest short story writer of Big Sky country . . . The conflicts throughout this book are age-old . . . but McGuane’s clean writing and psychological acuity enliven them all.” —Kirkus (starred review) “A compelling, emotionally charged collection.” —Lawrence Rungren, Library Journal (starred review)
About the Author
Thomas McGuane lives in McLeod, Montana. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the author of ten novels, three works of nonfiction, and two other collections of stories.Thomas McGuane’s The Bushwacked Piano, The Cadence of Grass, Driving on the Rim, Gallatin Canyon, Keep the Change, The Longest Silence, Ninety-two in the Shade, Nobody’s Angel, Nothing but Blue Skies, Panama, Some Horses, Something to Be Desired, The Sporting Club, and To Skin a Cat are available in Vintage paperback.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Hubcaps
In the hardwood forest, a shallow swamp immersed the trunks and roots of the trees near the lake. Owen and Ben hunted turtles among the waterweeds and pale aquatic flowers. The turtles sunned themselves on low branches hanging over the water, in shafts of light spotted with dancing dragonflies. Ever alert, the creatures tumbled into the swamp at the first sound, as though wiped from the branches by an unseen hand. The wild surroundings made Ben exuberant. He bent saplings to watch them recoil or shinnied up trees, and he returned home carrying things that interested him—strands of waterweed, bleached muskrat skulls, or the jack-in-the-pulpits he brought to his mother to fend off her irritation at having to wash another load of muddy clothes. Once, Owen caught two of the less-vigilant turtles, the size of fifty-cent pieces, with poignant little feet constantly trying to get somewhere that only they knew. Owen loved their tiny perfection, the flexible undersides of their shells, the ridges down their topside that he could detect with his thumbnail. Their necks were striped yellow, and they stretched them upward in their striving. Owen made a false bottom for his lunch box with ventilation holes so that he could always have them with him, despite the rule against taking pets to school or on the school bus. He fed them flies from a bottle cap. Only Ben knew where they were.
One afternoon, Owen came back from the swamp to find the flashing beacon of the town’s fire truck illuminating the faces of curious neighbors outside his house. He ran up the short length of his driveway in time to see his mother addressing a small crowd as she stood beside two firemen in obsolete leather helmets with brass eagles fixed to their fronts. She looked slightly disheveled in a housedress and golf-club windbreaker, and she spoke in the lofty voice she used when she had been drinking, the one meant to fend off all questions: “Let he who has never had a kitchen grease fire cast the first stone!” She laughed. “Blame the television. Watching The Guiding Light. Mea culpa. A soufflé.” Owen felt the complete bafflement of the neighborhood as he listened. Then her tone flattened. “Look, the fire’s gone. Good night, one and all.”
Owen’s father’s car nosed up to the group. His father jumped out, tie loosened, radiating authority. He pushed straight through to the firefighters without glancing at his wife. “Handled?” The shorter of the two nodded quickly. His father spoke to the neighbors: “Looks like not much. I’ll get the details, I’m sure.” Most had wandered off toward their own homes by then, the Kershaws among the last to go. Owen’s father turned to his wife, who was staring listlessly at the ground, placed his broad hand on the small of her back, and moved her through the front door, which he closed behind him, leaving Owen alone in the yard.
When Owen went in, his parents were sitting at opposite sides of the kitchen table, the Free Press spread out in front of them. The brown plastic Philco murmured a Van Patrick interview with Birdie Tebbetts: it was the seventh-inning stretch in the Indians game. Owen’s father motioned to him to have a seat, which he did while trying to get the drift of the interview. His mother didn’t look up, except to access the flip lid on her silver ashtray. She held a Parliament between her thumb and middle finger, delicately tapping the ash free with her forefinger. His father flicked the ash from his Old Gold with his thumbnail at the butt of the cigarette and made no particular effort to see that it landed in the heavy glass ashtray by his wrist. Commenting on what he had just read, his father said, “Let’s blow ’em up before they blow us up!”
“Who’s this?” his mother said, but got no answer. Instead, she turned to Owen. “Your father and I are going to take a break from each other.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“We thought you’d want to know.”
“Sure.”
His father lifted his head to glance at Owen, then returned to the paper. Owen knew better than to say a single word, unless it was about the weather. He wanted his parents to be distracted, so that he could fit in more baseball and get any kind of haircut he liked, but he worried about things falling apart entirely. He was unable to picture what might lie beyond that. School, of course, out there like a black cloud.
His mother said, “Ma said she’d take me in.”
At this, his father raised his head from the paper. “For God’s sake, Alice, no one is ‘taking you in.’ You’re not homeless.”
“Why don’t you go someplace, and I’ll stay here? Maybe someone will take you in.”
“I’ll tell you why: I’ve got a business to run.” His business, which dispatched plumbers and electricians to emergencies, was called Don’t Get Mad, Get Egan and made the sort of living known as decent. With tradesmen on retainer, he worked from an office, a hole-in-the-wall above a florist’s shop. An answering service gave the impression that it was a bigger operation than it was.
“Ma will think you’ve failed.”
“Well, you tell Ma I haven’t failed.”
“No, you tell her, sport.”
“I’m not calling your mother to tell her that I haven’t failed. That doesn’t make sense. Owen, where have you been? You look like you’ve been in the swamp.”
“I’ve been in the swamp.”
“Would you like to add anything to that?”
“No.”
His mother stubbed out her cigarette and said, “I think you owe your father a more complete answer, young man.”
“It’s nothing more than a little old swamp,” Owen said. “Mind turning that up? It’s the top of the eighth.”
Nobody was going anywhere except back to the newspaper.
Excerpted from Crow Fair by Thomas McGuane. Copyright © 2015 by Thomas McGuane. Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Most helpful customer reviews
12 of 14 people found the following review helpful. More from the Big Sky country... By John P. Jones III A fellow Amazon reviewer introduced me to Thomas McGuane, in a Nebraska bookstore of all places, by placing Gallatin Canyon (Vintage Contemporaries) in my hands, which I read and reviewed a couple of years ago. I was suitably impressed, so when this offering popped up on my Vine listing, I had to say: Yes. And now I am even more impressed. Like fine wine and women, McGuane is improving with age."Crow Fair" is the title to one of the 17 short stories in this book. Though all the stories seem to be set in Montana, that seems to be the only common link. McGaune's range is both wide and deep, in terms of character types as well as their experiences. There are astronomers, used car dealers, old cowboys, con artists, drug dealers, orthodontists, bankers, out-back guides, prisoners and dementia patients. There are numerous depictions of dysfunctional families. There are tragic outcomes, and others that are near misses. McGaune stories are not for skimming. A whole decade can meaningfully pass in a single paragraph; a key turn in the plot conveyed in a single sentence. For several years I have been enthralled by the short stories of the Canadian author Alice Munro, who just won the Nobel Prize. McGuane's stories in this collection are all of such caliber. I could not find a single "clunker."The following are a few passages I marked from different stories: "As a tradesman...I had clearly fallen below the social class to which my father thought I should belong. He believed that the fine education he'd paid for should have led me to greater abstraction, but while it's true that the farther you get from an actual product the better your chances for economic success..." "They had acquired their land from my wife's grandfather and, with it, a belief in family values that did not stand up to scrutiny, since most ranches these days were the scene of bitter inheritance battles." "They were unironic enthusiasts for all the mass pleasures the culture offered: television, NASCAR, cruises, Disney World, sports, celebrity gossip and local politics. Szabo often wished that he could be as well-adjusted as Melinda's family, but he would have had to be medicated to pursue her list of pleasures."And several stories are definitely "edgy." Consider going to an isolated river campsite to fish, with a guide you begin to realize is crazy and unstable...and armed. Or dealing with your once prim-and-proper mother who has dementia, and is in the nursing home, and hear her relates rather graphically an affair of her youth. One brother claims she might be making it all up. The other retorts that with dementia, you can't make it up!Thomas McGuane is a master story teller. Included in several stories are insights into the human conditions that resonated with some of my own experiences and that I have rarely seen addressed in print. Like Munro, he has many other collections of stories in print - this book listed 15 others, so I am certain that I'll be reading more tales, from the Great North, in the American West. 6-stars.
9 of 11 people found the following review helpful. Beautiful work of literary fiction By knittingmom Crow Fair by Thomas McGuane is a work of beautifully written literary works of short fiction, each story is set in Big Sky country, and yet while family and friendships appears to be the central theme, each story, there are seventeen in all, are quite different and yet all the stories draw the reader into the messed up lives of the characters, yet their flaws make them even more human and readily accessible to the reader. It is not often I read a collection of short stories I care to share with others, in hopes they too will pick up the collection, but Crow Fair is one of the exceptions. McGuane sense of humanity, tragedy, and wit make for an exceptional collection of short stories that fully engage the reader and often times make the reader pause and reflect. Several of the short stories stayed with me and I caught myself thinking of them long after I had finished the book. I look forward to reading more works my McGuane; he is truly a master of literary prose.
9 of 12 people found the following review helpful. Say what? By Blue in Washington These 17 short stories are definitely up to author McGuane's high standards for clear writing, finely tuned observation of human behavior and unexpected interactions. In the latter category, many of these pieces are surprisingly, shockingly, hilariously chockful of what-the-f....? moments that you might not see coming (I didn't in most of them). It had me wondering at the author's subtle and graceful manner in flinging elegant hand grenades.McGuane has set most, if not all, of his stories in Montana, but geography is not a major factor here. It's mostly about people behaving predictably or unpredictably--mis-communicating badly or being clueless as to what is happening around them. Somehow, most of this happens without much drama, but almost always with some kind amusement for the reader.I really loved these stories and recommend them to others.
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