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5.0 out of 5 stars
Two Hours to Kill, December 30, 2010
First off I'm a little gobsmacked that not one single bong brain or goggle-eyed hairball has yet seen fit to post a review of this stupendous book of short stories by Tom McGuane. This baker's dozen of dynamite tales came out in 1986 so it's not like it just landed or anything either. Yeesh but sometimes you do have to wonder a bit at the utter cluelessness of your very own species. Second off don't sully your eyes by reading either the Publisher's Weekly or Library Journal blurbs that Amazon inexplicably chose to accompany this McGuane page--like what kind of witless pointyhead subscribes to Library Journal, eh? I happen to know a vast number of librarians in fact and not one of them isn't touched by something deeply peculiar or clownish. Some even wear three-ply herringbone tweed all year round, smoke colossal dudeens and sport suede elbow patches--and that's just the women! Another librarian I know, a geeky and spidery gent at the best of times, walks with a most unusual gait and owns some sort of man purse which a pitbull puppy once got his choppers on down outside the subway station and I laughed so hard I got on the wrong train. Anyway, unspeakable book blather of this calibre ought to come with a health warning, aimed squarely at the egghead writing it now you understand, on account of tripe like this should instamatically result in fully trained storm troopers thoroughly dismantling the fundament of the cretin in question. The first story here in any case is called The Millionaire and is so slap happy and wacky that I had to read it three times in a row to fully savour its beautifully composed and condensed laughter. A stunner this one. Then further on there's Dogs, which I read before in Richard Ford's big fat fiction anthology I think, and it's also a hoot coz in this one a dude named Howie gets beaned by a softball, decides to have his face lifted and then the poor addlepate starts dognapping several of the prize pooches belonging to his friends and neighbours. I get the feeling Tom McGuane likes dogs a lot and so do I and I guess I like this story a lot too, even though it's mostly about a crazy guy who basically goes nuts. Skirmish is simply a splendiferous story about youngsters that if McGuane hadn't written so pitch-perfectly Barry Hannah probably might have given it a shot. Am currently halfway through A Man in Louisiana but had to cut this beauty short coz I was comically unsuccessful in my chuckle muffling on the subway this morning and a swell-looking babe with huge tracts of land kept giving me the hairy eyeball. Long story short: McGuane on paper just keeps writing the dadblangdest sentences you ever did read and when the dude's in his happy zone he'll leave you just like the sozzled Jack in The Millionaire, "slumped in the peculiar apelike repose produced by patent recliner chairs." That's certainly me to a tee most of the time. Matter of fact I got meself a lovely second-hand edition of McGuane's Keep the Change for Crimbolino and I must say I'm kinda chomping at the bit to get stuck into that novel once I get through skinning this spellbinding little moggy here.
New Year's Eve in person:
Finally finished last night on the train home A Man in Louisiana and the initial promise payed off in double digits. Turns out this story also concerns a dog and it was hard for me not to be reminded of Berl's spectacularly rendered winter scare with Pie in Driving on the Rim. Talk about yer eerily pleasing prelude! The dude in this story, Barry Seitz, has the unenviable job of being special assistant to a bucket-headed bozo named Mike Royce, "the tough, relatively young president of Ohio Exploration." One day at the Grand Hotel in Point Clear, Alabama, Mike gets the notion to spot-check a mental note delivered earlier to his hapless minion so he mentions Billy Herbert, a feature player in the oil trade apparently and a feller whose "main lick, for fun, is to hunt birds." Barry remembers a home address in Lake Charles and Mike then wonders if Barry wouldn't mind transporting a real live smell hound currently up for sale after intensive training by a man named Tippett living in Blue Wood, Mississippi, and now at last in need of wheels to get his fully metriculated snout and haunches all way over to that crude oil baron in Louisiana as a sort of overall gesture of Mike's general goodwill. Here's how Mike puts it to Barry: "If you remember back, we need to be doing something out of this world for Billy." Not long after leaving on his humiliating dog-hauling mission, Barry inexplicably begins to be absorbed by his task. Tooling along in his car he feels he's happily moving backwards into Southern history. The dog's name turns out prophetically enough to be Bandit and clearly and cleanly the story takes off entirely when this good-looking dog enters, briefly and excitingly exits and then finally, triumphantly, re-enters the picture. Another canine humdinger by this crafty old cowpoke. That line about spot-checking a mental note by the way is the small glory of creative composition in case you've ever wondered what such a artifact might actually look like--while my claim might smack slightly of hyperbole or some such inflation I stand by it coz a close reading of the exquisitely comic circumstances of Barry Seitz's predicament makes that seeming little thowaway one of the quietest and most devastatingly funny punchlines I've cracked up over in a bleeding age. McGuane plants these little wordmines all over his pages too so you never know when or where you'll next be blown to smithereeens like that unfortunate badger in his latest novel.
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