Frank has always been one step ahead of the game: Successful in business, lucky in love, he's built a financial empire and managed to have fun along the way. He's raised a daughter who's as sensible as she is delightful, he still has time to go fishing, and his life seems as bright and clear as the big sky of Montana. But when love goes wrong, he becomes an American hero on the run from his own life.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Though few would deny McGuane's wonderful ear and eye, his books, including The Bushwhacked Piano and Ninety-two in the Shade, with their macho western fantasy style, strike many as acquired tastes. Blue Skies , however, is significantly more accessible than McGuane's previous work . Frank Copenhaver, a congenial and vastly sympathetic hero, is a successful Montana real estate speculator who has hit all the right notes until the day his wife Gracie unexpectedly leaves him. Frank's subsequent attempts to sustain his emotional life and preserve his properties fail ever more ludicrously. His adored daughter seems to be falling for a homegrown fascist, Gracie is ever elusive, and his would-be affairs--with an accommodating travel agent, the dashing owner of the local Buick franchise and a bank teller with a yen to feed dogs--come messily apart. McGuane has created some uproarious set pieces--Frank's girlfriends joining together for a night raid, a mid-morning barroom brawl, a slapstick episode at a pig show--but he never loses sight of a piercing sadness below the high jinks. His ability to evoke the euphoria of the Great Outdoors is extraordinary; several fishing scenes offer classic epiphanies. And no praise is too high for the fluid, loose-limbed yet precise writing; this is American vernacular fiction at its peak. First serial to Esquire; author tour.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Kirkus Reviews
Ex-hippie and ex-druggie Montana businessman and cattle- rancher Frank Copenhaver is winding down: ``the man who had always been just ahead of events was now slightly behind them.'' He's going broke, he's lost his wife, and his daughter is keeping company with a Montana-Firster fascist-type who is Frank's own age or thereabouts. Frank--as the good McGuane character he is--is given to outsized and far-fetched screw-ups and high-jinks, but error isn't saving him now. Nothing is. This errant yet debonair loser--McGuane's perpetual protagonist--gains something with age, though--as does McGuane. A lovely stylist always, McGuane has been handicapped by having to jab at a hip counterculture as silly as his own dandy-ish characters were. But now, with the passing of that counterculture, with only its relics like Frank Copenhaver left, it--like Frank- -takes on poignancy, and McGuane is free to become a kind of American Kingsley Amis. Unloved and unwanted by the Zeitgeist (which prefers the Perot-like doings of the Montana-Firster), Frank is an unchained eye in a novel that shares the tang of liberation and is all over the map as he thinks, for example, now about McDonald's (``Americans had overtaken their product line, if he was any judge, waiting for McThis and McThat. If there were only a few departures or insights--McShit on the toilets, anything--it would be so much easier to take one's seat in this American meeting place and not feel such despair that the world was going on without you''), now about the disappeared drug-culture (``And what fun those darn drugs were. Marvelous worlds aslant, a personal speed wobble in the middle of a civilization equally out of control. And it was wonderful, however short, to have such didactic views on everything, everyone coming down from the mountain with the tablets of stone. Hard to say what it all came to now. Skulls in the desert''). Funny, sad, deliciously written (albeit with dumb plot curlicues): McGuane's most amiable novel, perhaps his best. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Absolutely enjoyable.,
By A Customer
This review is from: Nothing but Blue Skies (Paperback)
I simply can not stop reading this book. Since buying it, I have reread it so many times that I will soon need to buy a new copy. If you are looking for a novel that is funny, sad, moving, painful, unforgetable, very readable, and unbelievably enjoyable, then get this book. My only warning is that you will soon need to buy a new copy for display.
11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Comicdrama of middleaged Montana antihero for everyreader.,
By A Customer
This review is from: Nothing But Blue Skies (Hardcover)
This novel would be a great read for a wide variety of men and women as it would strike a chord with anyone who has ever gone through, or even stared in the face of: a marital rift, a midlife career-setback, a quicksand relationship with a young-adult offspring (whose "significant other" is a jerk).
It also will ring true to anyone who has lived in a small, slow-paced cowtown in the western US, or conversely to anyone anywhere who has only dreamed of such locales and craves to move to one or to just get fictionally involved with life in contemporary Montana; and it will appeal to those who love fly fishing, and to those who may have ever broken a few lesser laws after drinking a tad too much; and it will definitely find fans with those who have semi-humorously or semi-seriously questioned their own sanity or worth; and it will strike a familiar chord with those who have ever engaged in semi-outrageous and not-very-satisfying sexual encounters with friends and strangers; and it might bring a twinge to those readers who have ever landed in any embarrassing predicament because of their own rash behavior.
It also will appeal to a few folks who can't relate personally to ANY of the above, but who love to laugh out loud.
In short this is a story that will grab a wide variety of readers because of its engaging and believably-human antihero who has begun to flounder and to drag others with him into the swamp of his rather messy middle-age.
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Difficult to put down.,
By A Customer
This review is from: Nothing but Blue Skies (Paperback)
McGuane is easily among our most talented contemporary authors. There were times that I caught myself laughing out-loud as well as smiling at truly remarkable descriptions written with such skill that I felt as if I were standing in a river somewhere in Montana. He is able to pull the reader into his world of complex and entertaining characters that operate in an equally wonderful backdrop of Montana's ranches, rivers, and small towns. If you are a fan of other McGuane titles such as "Nobody's Angel" and "Keep the Change" you will not be disappointed with "Nothing but Blue Skies." I can't think of higher praise than to be truly sad to turn the last page and realize that such a beautifully and skillfully written story is over.
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