A recent visit to my local public library showed me Thomas
McGuane’s lately published novel Driving on the Rim on the
new books shelf. The dust jacket synopsis told me that it featured
a typical McGuanesque male protagonist named I.B. “Berl” Pickett,
an M.D. who struggles to comically balance personal and
professional considerations in a fictional Montana town. After
following McGuane’s career for thirty years and reading his entire
fiction and nonfiction output of roughly twenty books, I put
Driving on the Rim back on the shelf. I’ve had enough.
After two decades of living in the rural West and writing
about its historical and cultural aspects, I now rarely read
contemporary Western writers. I’ve discovered that it’s sufficient
to just live here, enjoying the slower pace of life and the vast
landscape without being told by the regional literary
intelligentsia what to think about it. I used to read with
enjoyment the likes of McGuane, Rick Bass, Ivan Doig, and the late
Edward Abbey. No more.
The so-called “New West” has undergone great changes in
the last few decades. Changing demographics have shifted its
politics more to the left (though the recent 2010 mid-term
elections changed some of that). It has a vocal environmental
movement centered in its cities and college towns, and in the pages
of High Country News and a host of internet
blogs.
The region has certainly produced writers during that
time. The main influence on them has been Wallace Stegner
(1909-1994), a prolific author of fiction and nonfiction who
transcended an undeserved critical regional label, attained a
national reputation, and won a Pulitzer Prize in 1972 for the novel
Angle of Repose. McGuane, Abbey, and Larry McMurtry, among
others, were themselves Stegner Fellows in the writer’s eponymous
prestigious writing program at Stanford. The irony is that the
myths of the Old West — the Hollywood West, if you will — that
Stegner detested, have been replaced by New West myths found in the
work of these aforementioned writers, and scores more. Western
writers, either the serious, or the “pulpy” kind, have always been
in the myth business.
These writers are particularly adept at misleading
gullible New York editors concerning the nature of daily life as
lived in the contemporary American West. The winner of this prize
is Annie Proulx, whose Brokeback Mountain strained
credulity as to the real lives of backcountry sheepherders, who
work alone, and are typically American Basques with roots in the
Spanish Pyrenees. But throw in its overarching pro-gay theme, and
Tina Brown, then manning (womaning?) the editorial helm at the
New Yorker —where Proulx’s story first appeared in 1997
— ate it up, as did Hollywood, of course. It was a perfect
marriage of the gay agenda with a mythic icon, the American cowboy.
Proulx in the course of her career has produced three volumes of
“Wyoming” stories about folks who all seem to live in trailers on
remote ranches, as if everybody in the Cowboy State did. One
trademark of these stories is her penchant for bizarre character
names (Diamond, Verl, Wacky, Fiesta), lending them a dose of
caricature, as their author promotes a sort of bad Flannery
O’Connor Western Gothic. A memorable line from Brokeback
Mountain is an expression of cowboy stoicism: “…if you can’t
fix it, you’ve got to stand it.” Well, I fixed it; I don’t read
Annie Proulx anymore.
McGuane has built his regional corpus by writing the same
novel over and over. As a literary modus operandi, this is nothing
new. In these half dozen books (Nobody’s Angel, Keep
the Change, The Cadence of Grass, among others) the
basic plot is simple: an aging male protagonist (like their author,
they’re getting older with each book) loses his wife through
divorce, loses the ranch or loses his job, etc. These setbacks
bring on drink or drugs and resulting outrageous public slapstick
behavior, thus alienating family and friends. Critics seem to be
tiring of this narrative line, and it’s earned the author some
opprobrium, despite his gifts as a stylist. The young McGuane had
been hailed as a master of ironic black comedy (Saul Bellow called
him “a language star”), and as literary devices go, this has served
him well and inextricably linked him to an American West in flux as
a milieu. The good old days are gone. The Marlboro Man is riding
into the sunset, and good riddance. McGuane’s tragedy is that after
early acclaim with The Bushwhacked Piano and Ninety
Two in the Shade (Bellow so taken with the former), he’s
spinning his pickup truck wheels with his decades-long-now series
of Montana tragicomedies.
Unlike the sepia-toned landscape itself, the Western
literary scene is green, and its foremost practitioner is Rick
Bass. He’s prolific. Barely in his fifties, he’s written twenty two
books, both fiction and nonfiction. Like writers of the 1930s who
cheapened their work by infecting it with the political
controversies of the time, Bass can’t seem to write anything
without injecting in subtle ways his environmental biases. To begin
with, his settings (the Montana Rockies; the rural South) lend
themselves to this template. His characters are many times
possessed of eccentric activist qualities, Bass’s style infused
with South American magical realism à la Gabriel Garcia Marquez. In
novellas such as Platte River and story collections such
as The Hermit’s Story they live in a cave or explore old
mines in the nude. In the latter’s title story am old man and a
woman crash through the ice of a dry lakebed only to discover an
Edenic world beneath. Bass’s nonfiction (The Ninemile
Wolves, The Lost Grizzlies, et al.) is more directly
doctrinaire, of course. In “Paradise Lost,” a 2005 piece in
Orion magazine, the writer states his common theme: “And
only now are we beginning to accept some of the basic truths… that
species extinction is rampant, perhaps unstoppable; that clearcuts
are expressions of raw madness; that global warming is a reality,
and that the mass of our numbers, and our relentless routine of
consumption, are accelerating it…”
And there you have it, the state of contemporary “Western”
letters: male menopause, a phony, weird Western Gothic , and
environmental hysteria. Then again, it’s a canon little different
from the national scene, which likewise suffers from “a dearth of
intellectual audacity and of aesthetic passion.” That last is from
“The National Letters,” an essay found in H.L. Mencken’s
Prejudices: Second Series (1920).
I wonder what the Sage of Baltimore would make of gay
sheepherders?
