May 19 Book

Gallatin Canyon by Thomas McGuane

*Starred Review* Gallatin Canyon is a narrow passage along a river in Idaho threaded with a heavily traveled highway. It can be a trap, which is the overarching metaphor in this collection of 10 finely chiseled short stories. McGuane, the author of nine novels, is prized for his uncanny knack for uniting flinty humor (aimed most often at male bewilderment) with classic landscape-inspired American lyricism, and he writes with particular intensity in these initially measured, then increasingly feverish, tales of odd encounters and doomed pairings, of men returning to their roots or heading for the hills. In "Ice," a teenager risks his life skating far out onto Lake Ontario in the dark. In "The Refugee," a spectacular story destined for a "best of" volume, a man suicidal with guilt sails the Caribbean, weathering monstrous storms and seeking absolution. Puzzlelike and peopled with cowboys, lawyers, junkies, and drunks, McGuane's virtuoso tales are studies in helplessness and withholding as men try to take control of themselves and their situations and instead are carried along on the great surging current of life, battered by other people's woes, tangled up in their own failings, and enraptured by the earth's grandeur

From Booklist