Nothing But Blue Skies - Hardcover

McGuane, Thomas

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0395545404 ISBN 13: 9780395545409

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin, 1992

Synopsis

Frank Copenhaver is living a charmed life under the big sky of Montana until his wife suddenly walks out on him and he finds himself in a tailspin of yearning, bad investments, and old grudges coming due

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Reviews

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.

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.

Edition details

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
• Publication date: 1992
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0395545404
• ISBN 13: 9780395545409
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 349