The Cadence of Grass by Thomas McGuane (review)

216 WAL 3 8 .2 SUMMER 2 0 0 3 Duncan is one of what he terms as our “River Soldiers,” fighting the good fight (216). His pen breathes fire and life-sustaining rain; as he states in “Birdwatching as a Blood Sport,” “The life that terrifies me and the life that I adore are one life” (47). This book more than merits the reading. The Cadence of Qrass. By Thomas McGuane. New York: Alfred A . Knopf, 2002. 238 pages, $24.00. Reviewed by Stephen Cook California State University, Sacram ento Just the mention of Thomas McGuane’s name is enough to start an argu­ ment in some circles, so let me be the first to say that I am fully aware of his defi­ ciencies, having read much of what he has written over the years. I once encouraged a female colleague who teaches a seminar in the literature of the American West to read Nothing but Blue Skies over the summer, and in the fall, she told me that upon encountering a section about midway in the novel, she had hurled the book across her living room. “Yup,” I said, “I think I know the part you’re referring to.” She did not finish the novel, and we have not spoken of McGuane since. This reaction is typical of many readers and represents an honest and understandable recoiling against a strain of adolescent humor and misogyny in McGuane’s work. Having made that stipulation, I still encourage those who do not believe that all art must serve their political ends to read McGuane’s latest novel, The Cadence of Grass. There are several reasons. First, present in the novel is McGuane’s standard use of dark humor, often employed in a self-deprecating way, but always showing a keen awareness of con­ trary or unusual juxtapositions. A case in point from The Cadence of Grass is Donald Aadfield, who was bom in Montana to a ranching family yet also spent some years in San Francisco as a member of a cross-dressers’ review. Having returned to his mother and father’s ranch, he enters a kitchen in which sits Evelyn Whitelaw, the protagonist: “Donald strode into the room, a great big man with a remarkably bushy gray beard and piercing black eyebrows. ‘Hullo!’ he said, sitting with such force that Evelyn was afraid his chair would break. Except that his hair was in curlers, he looked like any other rancher” (92-93). This scene is but a foretaste of the weirdness that ensues with the Aadfields, culminating with the do-it-yourself cremation of the family patriarch. McGuane’s keen observations of human nature have always been absurdly comic, beginning with the picaresque The Sporting Club, first published in 1968, but his descriptions of landscape, in particular the American West, serve as counterweights, revealing a union with the physical world that stabilizes his characters and offers them not so much a theology as immersion in something higher, the systems of nature spinning within a cosmos of frightening beauty. McGuane’s characters often evince reflective even reverential qualities as they encounter the oceanic vastness of the plains or the Gulf of Mexico. In The BOOK REVIEWS 217 Cadence of Grass, a character looks out upon a world he has known all his life as he rides a bus that will deliver him to his death: He looked out the window at low cliffs, sage-covered pastures, fences poking out of snow and enclosing nothing. Ranches looked like remote fortresses in the distance, white crowns of snow, blue shadows of road cuts. He smiled to see Angus cattle strung out and feeding to the hori­ zon, willows growing out of flat panels of ice. The land was wired together with telephone and electrical lines, railroad lines and highways, as if it might otherwise drift apart. Every now and then, a treeless new subdivi­ sion showed up, looking much the same as a car lot. They passed yellow stacks of lumber and a sawdust burner at a prosperous little mill. A dis­ tant plume of smoke suggested a rare, windless day. (226-27) McGuane’s writing is often infused with an...