New Yorker Fiction Review #232: "Wide Spot" by Thomas McGuane

Review of a short story from the Sept. 23, 2019 issue of The New Yorker...

Nothing overly complex or life-changing going on in this petite story from New Yorker regular Thomas McGuane; however, Thomas McGuane's worlds are almost always fun to inhabit for a few pages.

This story features an aging, small-time Montana politician canvasing his rural district, who bumps into one of his long-lost friends from his 20s, a guy he used to be in a band with. Throw in one or two Thomas McGuane-esque comic details about lame attempts to fight authority (a stuffed vulture placed symbolically in front of a savings & loan), a beautiful woman, and a macho brush with violence in the style of the disappearing Old West that McGuane is forever in love with, and you've got a story.

Thomas McGuane is, for me, one of those writers you don't think about a lot but whose writing I've actually managed to read a lot of over the years and who probably had as much of an affect on my early writing -- and conception of what it meant to be a writer -- as Ernest Hemingway or Hunter S. Thompson, two of my professed literary idols who vastly overshadow McGuane, at least in fame and glory if not in longevity.

Thomas McGuane was actually a friend of Hunter S. Thompson's and -- while I'm not sure if he ever met Ernest Hemingway -- like any 20th century white American male writer who writes about the outdoors, his work owes a lot to Hemingway's deep love and reverence for nature, for hunting and fishing, and for the self-exploration that comes along with those solitary activities. Whereas Ernest Hemingway's characters tested themselves in war or against giant, horned beasts, Thomas McGuane's often come into conflict (comically) with other outdoorsmen, or simply stomp through civilized life like Hunter S. Thompson did, cleaning up or running from the messes they leave in their wake.

It makes me wonder what, if anything, is the literary legacy left by the likes of Thomas McGuane and Hunter S. Thompson on my own generation of writers, and whether or not there are even any who could be seen as heirs to this tradition. I'm sure there are some lurking out there, but the world Hemingway inhabited has disappeared, for better and for worse. And the world in which guys like McGuane and Thompson flourished -- the far less regulated, post-60s, pre-AIDS, pre-internet, Eagles and Jimmy Buffett, "flying my single engine plane down to Baja to buy a load of grass" era -- has vanished as well and those who are left of it are essentially senior citizens. Again, maybe for the better. Who knows.

So in some way, stories like these are an Epilogue or even an epitaph to the adventures of a generation and a type of person swiftly (but not too swiftly, let's hope) being shuffled off this mortal and literary coil. Who will take up that mantle, and should it be taken up at all?