Crow Fair: Stories

by Thomas McGuane

From one of our most deeply admired storytellers, author of the richly acclaimed Gallatin Canyon, his first collection in nine years.

Set in McGuane's accustomed Big Sky country, with its mesmeric powers, these stories attest to the generous compass of his fellow feeling, as well as to his unique way with words and the comic genius that has inspired comparison with Mark Twain and Ring Lardner. The ties of family make for uncomfortable binds: A devoted son is horrified to discover his mother's antics before she slipped into dementia. A father's outdoor skills are no match for an ominous change in the weather. But complications arise equally in the absence of blood, as when life-long friends on a fishing trip finally confront their dislike for each other. Or when a gifted cattle inseminator succumbs to the lure of a stranger's offer of easy money. McGuane is as witty and large-hearted as we have ever known him -- a jubilant, thunderous confirmation of his status as modern master.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Westerns, Literary Fiction, Audiobook, Contemporary, Anthologies

288 pages, Kindle Edition

First published March 3, 2015

About the author

Thomas Francis McGuane III is an American writer. His work includes ten novels, short fiction and screenplays, as well as three collections of essays devoted to his life in the outdoors. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, National Cutting Horse Association Members Hall of Fame and the Fly-Fishing Hall of Fame.

McGuane's early novels were noted for a comic appreciation for the irrational core of many human endeavors, multiple takes on the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s. His later writing reflected an increasing devotion to family relationships and relationships with the natural world in the changing American West, primarily Montana, where he has made his home since 1968, and where his last five novels and many of his essays are set. He has three children, Annie, Maggie and Thomas.

Reviews

[James Thane · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an excellent collection of short stories set in the rural areas of modern-day Montana. Most of the characters are living on the edge socially and economically, struggling to hang on and make sense of lives that often simply don't make sense. The characters, both men and women, are beautifully rendered and each of the stories is a tiny gem.

[H · Rating 5 out of 5]

Out of the 17 stories in the collection, I count 7 total knockouts. They are:

-"Weight Watchers": A man takes in his father, who's been kicked out by his wife for being too fat
-"The House on Sand Creek": two bad parents are better at arguing than parenting
-"Grandma and Me": a man forgets his blind grandmother at the creek when a dead body floats by
-"On a Dirt Road": a former senator is dealing with how bad everything's become in his life
-"The Good Samaritan": a man whose son is in prison hires a shady character to help him on the ranch
-"River Camp": two childhood friends who aren't very good friends as adults go on a disastrous fishing trip
-"Crow Fair": two brothers deal with their elderly mother's dementia

McGuane accomplishes so much here, but he does at least two things on nearly every page: he stays ahead of the reader, and he is very funny. Though these stories are straightforward and the "reveals" aren't necessarily shocking, they're still somehow surprising. When bad things happen, McGuane makes them believable because his characters aren't very good at making the right decisions; but these bad things are almost unbearably affecting to the reader because he gives his cast of lovable screwups a ridiculous degree of pathos. You feel every setback, injury, mishap, and tragedy. McGuane's characters are either Biblically stubborn or Biblically cursed (in the first case, they are responsible for their loneliness and in the second, extenuating circumstances force loneliness upon them); either way it results in them getting separated from those around them. It's one of the best short story collections I've ever read.

[Lorna · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Set in his beloved Big Sky country, these stories attest to the generous compass of Thomas McGuane's fellow feeling, as well as to his unique way with words and a comic genius in the vein of Twain and Gogol. In this triumphant collection, filled with grace and humor, the ties of family make for uncomfortable bends: A devoted son is horrified to discover his mother's antics before she slipped into dementia, and a father's outdoor skills are no match for a change in the weather. But complications arise equally in the absence of blood, as when lifelong friends on a fishing trip finally confront their deep dislike for each other. Or when a gifted traveling cattle breeder succumbs to the lure of a stranger's offer of easy money. McGuane is as witty and large-hearted as we have ever known him, and 'Crow Fair' is a jubilant, thunderous confirmation of his status as a modern master."

And that was the blurb on my copy of this book Crow Fair: Stories by Thomas McGuane convincing me that I must read this book of seventeen short stories, a complex mixture of hurt, shame, betrayal, love, resentment and loss. These were powerful stories, each in their own haunting way as it imparts a rich and fascinating portrait of Montana. While this is my first book by this author, it certainly won't be my last.

[Perry · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stories Oughta Set You to Grinnin' Like a Mule Eatin' Cactus



If you haven't read anything by the silver-penned slang-whanger Thomas McGuane, you should consider punching yourself up a ticket to the CROW FAIR. McGuane strings the whizzers in this 2015 collection of twistical tales set on a Montana line between his patented dry sense of humor and his keen perception of the common natures of humans.

As in McGuane's prior florilegia, these stories center almost solely 'round folks in a box facing some type of demon in persona, vel in natura, be that a set-to with a lover or neighbor over a silly somethin,' some poor wrangler gettin' the boot or caught in a force majeure, or a no-good scamp loaded to the gunwales. Cowboy Mac proffers his primary manleads to an assortment of white liners, mudsills and, the worst, the lily livers.



His leading ladies are mostly soiled doves sashaying through mountainous, settings, such as in the title story in which a widowed mom confesses to her two sons on her death bed that, despite being married for nearly half a century to their late father, she was long the perennial "poke" of the Crow Indian chief during the annual run of the local Crow Fair. In my favorite (the funniest) story, Prairie Girl, a former prostitute shines and winds her way to being the president of the local bank, with hilarious consequences.

Now, I wouldn't necessarily bullshit you into believing that these troubled souls could just as well be your neighbors (unlessn' Cowboy Mac's a neighbor of yorn), but they're mighty realistic-like. I'm hoping you ain't too slow to be catchin' my drift here, so to speak.

This is fun though. It ain't no bullshit to say that, as you read these all-fired stories, there ain't no way you'll be able to reckon which away that dadburn pickle's gonna squirt.

[Jim Steele · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have enjoyed one or two of his novels and stories in the past. I remember a sense of place almost like Cormack McCarthy and sparse but interesting characters like Hemmingway. Some of these stories are very good. Some aren't. The general feeling here is a group of stories that are excellent novel ideas, but I left wanting the complete fleshed out thing rather than these cut down stories.

[Alex · Rating 3 out of 5]

McGuane's Montana short stories are highly readable and full of lines wry and funny lines, my favorite being: "The feeling came back to me, from the days of our marriage, that I was doomed in life to take a lot of shit and make weak jokes in response." In fact, many of McGuane's characters in this collection are such sad sack characters, lamely playing the hand that has been dealt to them, or, should they bluff, getting their comeuppance and then some. In that sense, they start to blend, and by the end I could see too much of the technique (explaining each character's station in life so that we know what their motives are) and not enough of the humanity that makes the best stories in this collection live wires. Still, a solid batch of stories and an evocative depiction of Big Sky country.

[Emily Kestrel · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think this is one of the best short story collections I have read in a very long time. McGuane's underlying themes, such as how oblivious people can be to the realities of their own lives, are rather serious, but the stories themselves are witty, entertaining and a lot of fun to read. In this respect, he reminds me a bit of Flannery O'Connor. I love his eye for detail and the way he has of getting to the "core" of a character with just a few sly sentences. There really isn't a bad story in the bunch, but some of my favorites include: "Weight Watchers," "The House on Sand Creek," "Grandma and Me," "The Casserole," "The Good Samaritan," and "Canyon Ferry."

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

Crow’s Fair was my introduction to the work of Thomas McGuane. An author with decades of acclaim to his work. He may be better known for his works from the 70s or 80s but this collection of short stories from 2015 was the first to enter my hands.

A collection of short stories detailing slice of life stories from Middle America. Everyday people getting by and with a few splashes of excitement in between. Most of these stories have a very melancholy tone. The characters of these stories deal with the very real hardships of life. Death, divorce, getting older, losing friends, etc. This collection as a whole is not very uplifting and you can tell McGuane is speaking to a lot of these themes from a personal level through these characters. It's an interesting collection, and I’m sure something that long time readers of his who’ve grown older with him would appreciate but for me it wasn’t really what I was looking for at this time.

Oftentimes I found myself sidetracked from this collection, reading other works that grabbed my interest more. While there were stories I enjoyed, I found it mostly to be a mixed bag. McGuane’s style is certainly on display but I found that many of the shorter stories didn’t offer much interest to me. I was more drawn into the longer stories, something that really makes me want to read a full novel from him.

McGuane’s characters really are the best part of this collection. I was impressed with how many perspectives he could take on. Men and Women of various ages dealing with different angles of the same problems of life. While varied in perspectives it really felt central to the themes of aging and getting through life.

While overall a sad collection of stories there is some humor and levity to these stories. I would describe these characters and situations as a mix between the contents of a Bruce Springsteen song and an episode of King of the Hill. Nothing here is too bleak but it does land more as a downer than anything else.

While not the introduction I was hoping for, I am still interested in reading more from Thomas McGuane and will be exploring his earlier novels as a next step.

[Gabriel Congdon · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm getting the timing off. I'm falling a book behind on reviews, in fact, I'm going to knock out a quick Auster re-view, to end this crap.

McGuane though, just incredible. If good writing is a series of spinning plates on your chin while riding a unicycle, his plates revolve serenely like space-age ufos, he glides one-wheeled around the stage.

What I like about McGuane that his characters have jobs, they have to, it's not like lit where characters glide around on a plot and have time away from their 11:00-to-7:00. Life is labor, it might as well be a weight in literature somewhere. They're (these characters these) brought to the city, not the city of Dickens and the Industrial Rev, but the cities of Montana. They have land and struggle to sustain it. Emotional binds too become frayed and untethered. Private dreams become public nuisances. Meanwhile, all the botany of the midwest observes unobtrusively, nature's mysterious meanings dulled to an organism receding farther and farther from any semblance it could have ever construed with her. Nature hates us, it always, however, just outside the window.

Probably, a 4 starer, but I'm giving it that fifth for the perpetual star McGuane career is.

Yo, Addage, I think you'd like this cat. I'm willing to stick my neck out.

[Ed · Rating 3 out of 5]

Wonderfully written collection of short stories but the abrupt endings disappointed me.

[wally · Rating 4 out of 5]

finished this collection yesterday the 28th of january 2020 good read four stars really liked it kindle library loaner have read several from mcguane...and i go to put this on the "mcguane" shelf, assuming it exists having read mcguane but no shelf with that name. go figure. these short stories are worth a read even if like me you're hesitant to read shorts be like traveling somewhere and you don't want to stop midway now it's off to investigate how i shelved other mcguane stories.

[Diane S ☔ · Rating 3 out of 5]

Review to follow.

[Mark Stevens · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Montana Noir" (Akashic Books) turned me on to Thomas McGuane’s compelling “Motherlode” and that sent me to his latest short-story collection, "Crow Fair," which also includes that short story. Yes, I read it again. Four times? Five? It keeps on giving.

I found one other story in "Crow Fair" on par with “Motherlode,” a taut battle of survival and justice-by-nature in the great outdoors with the understated title “River Camp,” but the entire collection is worth reading.

Montana is the general backdrop, but scrap your Western clichés. McGuane’s characters are real world. They have their feet on the ground, loose as that foothold might be. Horizons are modest, dreams more so. Most McGuane characters accept their meagre lot. Those that push the envelope face consequences for their ambition, such as Dave in “Motherlode.” If all the characters in these stories could get together and compare notes, the collective analysis might suggest it’s a good idea for everyone to keep their head down and stay put. The Montanascape stands in for all-American hard knocks and earthy grit. The titles alone suggest the turf, from “Hubcaps” and “On a Dirt Road” to “The House on Sand Creek” and “An Old Man Who Liked to Fish.”

Bleak? Maybe. Entertaining? Yes. In spots, harrowing. Though for maximum action and story, head to “Motherlode” and “River Camp.”

McGuane’s stories feel so matter-of-fact. The writing is non-flashy; easy-going. Not every story comes with a twist or a jolt ending. McGuane mixes up the moods and flavors. Darkness ebbs and flows. The characters are often loners and misanthropes. Many ponder the next opportunity to pound a couple of “stiff ones.” McGuane doesn’t shine his prose on celebrities or town leaders. Family and economic strife abound. For every flash of upward mobility, as in “Prairie Girl,” there is a whole bunch of sideways and down.

There are story summaries of this collection elsewhere, but for me “Motherlode” is the collection’s, well, gem. Its 28 pages could be 280 if you wanted to blow this up, stretch it out. But McGuane goes for taut (no wonder it fit perfectly in the Montana Noir collection, too.) Like many of the other stories in "Crow Fair" it’s about rebirth. Our hero Dave, in fact, is very good at grasping (literally) life at birth. He is an expert at “detecting and synchronizing estrus.” After several false career starts and only finishing high school, Dave discovers he is a “genius preg tester.” Dave is so talented, he can detect a fetus at two months, “when the calf was smaller than a mouse.”

Dave’s keen sense of weight in his hands comes in handy when he holds the gun owned by a guy named Ray, who has forced Dave to drive him far out into the countryside to meet a woman in a sort of low-key kidnapping. When Dave gets his chance to hold the gun, he realizes it’s dead. A fake. Dave also realizes that his own life needs a jolt. Dave feels like the only thing he has accomplished in his life is high school.

Ray’s destination is this woman, Morsel. He met her online. She lives with her father Weldon in a “a two-story ranch building barely hanging on to its last few chips of paint.” Dave delivers Ray but hangs around and it slowly dawns on him, especially given the lack of serious threat from Ray’s fake weapon, that he might have been handed an opportunity that he shouldn’t pass up. Morsel is involved in a drug-running scheme that might prove lucrative, selling bootleg OxyContin in the Bakken oil field.

“Motherlode” is compressed. It has been squeezed dry of excess. For most part, the dialogue is in brisk snippets. And then Dave and Ray are talking after dinner in their room. Dave has just informed Ray he knows the gun is a fake. Ray seems only mildly concerned that his stunt has been revealed. And then Ray, after returning from taking a leak off the porch, launches into a monologue that is a piece of work. It’s hilarious, sad, colorful, detailed, and imaginative. Ray recounts his erstwhile acting career, right down some stints in community theater, and more adventures, too. Got married, had a baby girl, lost my job, got another one, went to Hawaii as a steward on a yacht belonging to a movie star, who was working at a snow-cone stand a year before the yacht, the coke, the babes, and the wine. I had to sign a nondisclosure agreement, but then I got into a fight with the movie star and got kicked off the boat at Diamond Head.

The monologue opens up Dave’s mind about his own career trajectory and, even as Dave realizes Ray is born liar, the die is cast.

Dave makes a run to cross-country drive to Modesto to demonstrate his value to Ray and Morsel, refusing to acknowledge his natural talents. “He drove straight through, or nearly so. He stopped briefly in Idaho, Utah, and Nevada to walk among cows. His manner with cattle was so familiar that they didn’t run from him but gathered around in benign expectation. David sighed and jumped back in the car. He declined to pursue this feeling of regret.”

Poor Dave. Lucky us.

[Stacy Bearse · Rating 5 out of 5]

Here are 17 compact works of prose that deliver an emotional knockout. McGuane's stories describe the strains of family life and friendships in the rugged Montana prairies and mountains. His economic – and witty - narratives drill deeply into the bonds of love and loyalty that comprise our relationships. Fathers and sons. Husbands and wives. Mothers and children. McGuane is a modern-day Mark Twain who understands the human condition like no other author.

[Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent collection. McGuane's variety of scope is fantastic. He has the rare ability of compressing the vastness of the modern day Western American landscape into nuggets of restless discomfort. The characters in these stories fitfully attempt to reconcile the rehashed, questionable glory of their ancestors with a disappointing world of missed chances and wasted time.

[Shannon · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars.
There is some really great writing in this collection. I just didn't feel moved at all by it, as I had hoped.

[Jerry Peace · Rating 4 out of 5]

This collection is what short stories are all about. Although primarily set in Montana, I like that location is not a character, is far less significant than persons. No zombies, no extraterrestrials, not one spy; just people in their myriad tornadoes of foolishness that scatter wreckage of marriages and childhoods of pain, of jobs that don't come close to filling the vast inside hole, of misshapen lives that play out with small grimaces and little palls one step below regrets, yet tinted and edged with a grace that shimmers in and out of our vision. Favorite quotes- "She had been trained to accept the privacy of every dream world." "'When you go through the pearly gates, you want to be clean-shaven. Everybody else up there has a beard.'" "Only Dad and I were equals, just looking at life without being at war with it." "River Camp" and "Lake Story" are my favorites.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

The stories in Thomas McGuane's collection really evoke a certain mood and this mood encompasses all the stories in this book. Think diet Flannery O'Connor, set in Montana. A lot of the stories have this feeling of menace, or of characters with malicious intent, than only the reader is privy to. Like in the second story, "Grandma and Me." The narrator enjoys taking his grandmother out every once in awhile, but abandons her to chase something down the river. It doesn't seem so bad, but then we find out that the grandmother is blind, and unable to find her way back home alone.

Another example is "On a Dirt Road," in which a husband tells his wife that he is not interested in going out for pizza with another couple. He decides to go over their neighbor's house, where he meets the young couple for the first time. Only then does he decide to go to the pizza place to show off his new friends. Upon arriving, he discovers that his wife and the other couple were never there.

I loved the story "River Camp," in which two, kind-of best friends go on an outdoor vacation in the middle of nowhere with a guide who doesn't seem quite so qualified, surrounded by wilderness and wildlife.

"Motherlode" is one of the longer stories in the book, but also one of the most compelling, when a man is kidnapped, but is then introduced to a world of drugs in which he receives an offer he cannot refuse.

After reading this collection, it is clear why McGuane is lauded as one of the finest short story writers.

[Harry Malcolmson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Eight of the seventeen Crow Fair short stories previously appeared in the New Yorker. Given the status and indeed the sophisticated taste of the magazine that is an impressive number. I am not quite sure where McGuane ranks in terms of the number of stories that the New Yorker has published of single authors, but it certainly attests to the level of respect it has for his work. The magazine is the venue that brought McGuane to my attention. There is a nice irony in McGuane’s appearance in the magazine in that culturally his Montana stories culturally deal with environments that are polar opposites to the urban sophistication of New Yorker.

Prior to reading McGuane, I would say I had never been to Montana. No longer. Its special character is now lodged in my head. Grassland land smells the stink of humans, the sweat-stained cowboy hats and the insufficiently bathed women. McGuane deploys a culture that is distinct, unique to its geography. The parameters of conventional conduct expand in tandem with its spaces. Its inhabitants routinely behave in ways in urban settings that would be regarded as beyond eccentric, as socially unacceptable.

Montana space McGuane’s text makes clear is uncontained and unfettered. There is always space beyond eyesight, thereby dissolving the perimeters of known and unknown. It isn’t merely landscape space that is unfettered. Space between individuals is a constant. Individuals whose personalities seek isolation are accommodated, as are domestic spaces in marriages and family relationships. In the Montana environment, the socialization conventions that enable urban living are unnecessary. I am unsure what his characters would think of their characterizations. I suspect some would be outraged, some pleased and some puzzled.

McGuane’s observational mode can not be called loving. He records but the tone is ironic. There is as much “these crazy people” as homage. The inhabitants are as much to be pitied as admired. They live hardscrabble, marginal, largely unsuccessful lives, judged by conventional standards. The inhabitants of his story are Grapes of Wrath like proud, independent principled individuals. Their conduct is grasping, as much looney and lovable.

.A number of stories are written in the first person. Thus, McGuane is personally present as a character within them. However, his stance is almost as a stranger within the lives of the other role is not integrated. He may be with them but he is not of them. Whether the story is written in first and third-person mode, the observational tone is a constant.

This quote demonstrates McGuane’s first-person mode in which he functions as participant and observer. Here are quotes from the first story in Crow Fair. It sets the tone for most of them. The narrator recounts a series of incidents over the course of the only child narrator’s life. It is self-evident that the “self-absorbed” parents are the world’s worst. However, as McGuane demonstrates with utmost subtly, the parental damage he has suffered extends to a lack of understanding of the damage that has occurred.

“I have been told I came from a dysfunctional family, but I never felt that way. I viewed my family as an anthropologist might view them. I spent my time wondering where they could have come from.”

“As an only child, I was the sole recipient of my parents’ malignant parenting.”

“I have no complaints about my upbringing. My parents were self-absorbed and never knew where I was ...I have been asked if I was damaged by my family life and the answer is a qualified no. I’m unable to envisage letting anyone stay in my house for more than a night and preferably not for a whole night. … I’ve always enjoyed the thought of non-existence.”

Endings (and beginnings) are the bane of writers, whether of novels or short stories. The lottery is more difficult because as in a compendium of them such as in Crow Fair, there are a number of them. McGuane seems to have no problem with beginnings, They grasp and hold attention, then infill with detail sufficient to lead us forward into the body of the story. Endings are another matter. With McGuane they fall into two categories: the none ending and the surprise ending. They make a nice pairing. That as we work through a story we don’t know whether it will have an ending or simply peter out into an unknown future, which grants variety and a king of suspense to our reading.

Weight Watchers and House on Sand Creek are stories that belong in the open-ended category. Casserole -- probably my favourite storey in the book -- falls squarely in the surprise ending category. It is followed by An Old Man That Likes to Fish, a story, that rather straddles the categories. It builds slowly desiring the pleasure a lifelong fisher takes in his fly fishing skills. However, it seems as if the story is about the varying impact and ravages of Alzheimer’s on the fisherman, his wife. The mood is broken by the information that we don’t observe by learning indirectly. The event certainly breaks the languid descriptions of the fisherman’s progress. But the story doesn’t end there. It continues in a kind of coda that returns us to the dreamy half in this world and half elsewhere state of the fisherman’s wife. It leaves us reflecting as to between the dead and living which one is the more fortunate at this point in their lives.

Hubcaps is a moving and sad story of the shaping of a not quite normal boy and the alternative routes that his life travels. One road that is briefly open leads to a modest but stale living space. Another to a dysfunctional confused existence. The point is how the arbitrary conduct of individual determine which alternative comes to be selected. It is basically about bullying, not so much in the physical sense as in the opportunity the boy’s vulnerable needs to serve as an outlet for the frustrations of others.

Not all stories are world-beaters. On A Dirt Road doesn’t make it. Nor does A Long View to the West. The difference is however, it is the longest story in the book. I suspect McGuane considered putting it aside, but probably felt he had too much invested in it. It builds narrative suspense which the author is unable to find a means of delivering. The story kind of gives up by way of the abrupt death of the protagonist, with no particular explanation as to motivation. It is as if inadvertently a few paragraphs had been left out of the text.

In Casserole, we transpose from the least to the most successful story. It features a surprise ending par excellence. Spoiler Alert -- it presents a couple who get along to get alone over the course of a 25-year childless relationship. The parents own a ranch that the wife regards with sentimental attachment. The husband feels no such nostalgia. They undertake one of their periodic trips to visit her parents. The husband is surprised why the wife has backed so much luggage. Just after their arrival and the unloading of the luggage, the mother-in-law hands him a casserole in a lunch box. Advising that this is for his drive home. Superb.

Good Samaritan displays another instance of the relationship between the elements of typical McGuane stories. It consists of a long build-up to a surprise ending that we are not going to guess. In this respect, it qualifies as a taste, in that the narrative meanders along with no hint of a destination. Because we sense this is not a trial off into nothing genre ending, we accept that we must be patient and wait for the author to deliver an ending. In Good Samaritan, the samaritan turns out to be not a kindly helping out stranger of the Bible Story but such person’s polar positive.

When as in Samaritan, the ending is neither particularly credible or satisfying, we judge its success by its fabric, that is its tone, details, insights, observations that bear us along to its climax. The test is how much have we enjoyed the pages it has taken to reach the ending. Here is McGuane’s genius which is that the individual sentence, paragraphs and pages are rich, engaging terrain. We may conclude the surprise ending a little flat but we don’t mind in the least the effort it gook to arrive at it.
Lake Story is pretty much a twin of Good Samaritan. That pretty much is all I need to say other than the ending is richer, more ironic and except the perspective of a person left out in the cold, rather good fun.

Crow Fair ends, logically enough, with a story titled: “Crow Fair”. It is a little strange, but then, pretty everyone is strange to some degree or other. As I say, the locals are Montana and as I work through the book I secure an increasing sense of what that means.

The story focus on four persons: two brothers, their dementia-inflicted mother and later on, an Indian Chief by the name of White Clif. The mother’s mind slips back and forth from rational consciousness into random wanderings that cannot be related to real-life events known to the two sons. One son takes this ins stride. The other son becomes obsessed with the mother’s meanderings about “browser.” The division between them stands metaphorically for a range of response families to dementia patients: bemusement, fascination, apprehension, alarm. Brother Earl admonishes his brother: “Kurt, she has dementia. She could be making this all up.” Kurt replies: “how little you know. Dementia means she can’t make it up.”

Having set the academic dementia issue in place, we are off. It turns out that the mother indeed had a “browser” event, a fling with White Cliff, that actually did not last that long. Nor did it mean the brothers were fathered elsewhere. The story could well have ended there. However, McGuane felt it necessary to add a coda in which the less fortunate brother’s career takes rags to riches turn.

River Camp is the penultimate story in Crow Fair. It is a charmless, downer three-hander in which all of its participants do not emerge at the story’s end, alive. We are far from convinced that there was a need for McGuane to kill them off. He could not have been in the best of moods when he composed the story. Perhaps, it was better that he take out his negativity on its characters rather than his wife and children. Two of the three perished by inadvertently taken by a river current over a fall. They are said never to have been seen again, which is unlikely. The third gentleman took his life in a strange fit of despair and is then consumed -- literally as in dinner time -- by bears.

[Gaylord Dold · Rating 2 out of 5]

McGuane, Thomas. Crow Fair: Stories, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2015 (267pp. $25.95)

Tom McGuane lives on a ranch outside McLeod, Montana where he raises horses and is an accomplished trainer and rider. He’s lived there for many years, having purchased the property after a stint writing movie scripts. His early novels “The Sporting Club”, “The Bushwacked Piano” and especially “Ninety-two in the Shade”, were famous moments in the revival of American fiction in its wilder, sometimes surreal aspects in the late 60s and early 70s when outlaws like Raymond Carver and Donald Barthelme burst onto the scene. In years since, his writing has matured, his vision cleared, and his books, still part-comic, part-manic, now contain a heft that some writers like Richard Ford think important. But McGuane, unlike Ford, retains his sense of humor and perspective, and is capable of giving the reader a ride on the multi-decked bus of character and confabulation.

The stories in “Crow Fair” appeared first mostly in The New Yorker, though some showed up in Granta and McSweeney’s. Much of the wildness is gone from McGuane’s Montana, and most of the characters he invents are part of the “new economy”. The first story, “Weight Watchers” is indicative. McGuane writes, “Dad returned from Helena and sat in my kitchen with his laptop to catch up on business while I met with Dee and Helen Folsom out on Skunk Creek, leaving the whir of the interstate…I was building the Folsom’s first house on a piece of ground that Dee’s rancher uncle had given him.” Here is a narrator who builds houses on a “nice piece of ground”, lives alone, and is entertaining his father who’s been kicked out of the family home by Mom until Dad’s weight falls below 250.

Fathers and sons figure in another story called “A Long View to the West” in which used car salesman Clay watches while the deteriorating health of his father leads to discomfort, distress, and finally death. The title refers to the siting of a funeral plot for the father. When Clay stops by the hospital, he asks his dad, “What are you doing?” His dad replies, “Dying. What’s it look like?” These characters seem to be McGuane’s new focus. They are town people going down the economic ladder into divorce, torpor, or silence, with estranged families and broken friendships littering their pasts. In “Canyon Ferry”, McGuane writes, “John’s wife hadn’t remarried, but she was in a stable relationship with a reliable man, while John, laid off from the newspaper a year by then, was living alone in a way to suggest he always would…” To a large extent, the stories McGuane tells are about male crisis, family failure and generational decline.

Most of these are workmanlike “New Yorker” pieces, written with McGuane’s increasingly bright polish. A few, like “Shaman” and “River Camp” are purely failures. One story, about Dave the cattle inseminator, chronicles implausible events surrounding a drugs and money laundering scheme. It ends, “Dave never felt a thing.” No story about crime or anything else should end, “Dave never felt a thing.”

[Heronimo Gieronymus · Rating 5 out of 5]

As of this minute, CROW FAIR is the most recent Thomas McGuane. As of this minute, Thomas McGuane is seventy-seven years old. He is an old-timer, and in many ways it is unlikely that you could find a better representative of the subtle modulations of growth over time. McGuane has been one of my very favourite writers since I first discovered him. His second novel, THE BUSHWHACKED PIANO, remains one of my very favourite novels of all time. It is, of course, a product of the era of insanely robust American counterculture. It is clearly the novel of a congenitally brilliant dope-smoker. Because McGuane is one of my favourite writers, it stands to reason that I love the work that has followed his second novel. Much has been written by wags who insist that the older, more mature McGuane - rancher, fisherman, emergent old-timer - marks a progressive growth (improvement) as a literary stylist. The consensus seems to be that the pared down, sober, sharp, and pathos-heavy writing is vastly superior. Well, I am not necessarily of this camp. I still think that THE BUSHWHACKED PIANO is his finest work. This is not to say that I think the simpler, wiser McGuane is not the McGuane we need. He is. And his mastery is to me so self-evident that I don't feel any pressing need to extemporize on it at length. I love that this collection is dedicated to Barry Hannah. Of my five favourite American writers of a certain kind of fun quasi-countercultural literary fiction (McGuane, Hannah, Charles Portis, Thomas Berger, and Harry Crews), Hannah is the writer McGuane most resembles. These are guys who speak (at a stunningly elevated level) American language about American places and American people. If this is the kind of thing you are looking for, then CROW FAIR will almost certainly speak to you. It is a perfect collection. It contains a bunch of the very finest late-period McGuane and at least two stories as great as any I have ever read. These are absolutely traditional short stories engaged w/ the tradition. They would fit comfortably anywhere contemporary short stories are found. McGuane has become, in point of fact, a writer not altogether dissimilar from Alice Munro (though his humour remains far more mordant). Great short stories (in the "tradition") live and die by their endings. And I can assure you, if this is what you are in the market for: again and again, w/ shiver-inducing genius and easy-seeming profundity, McGuane nails his landings.

[William · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am going to give it 3 stars even though I had a 1 star experience.
Short stories are not something that I experience often. It requires a different focus and for listening to it on audio I had a difficult time discerning the ending and the beginning of the next.
The only story that I had a sense of completeness was "Crow Fair", the last presented.

[Jan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love McGuane's style. I kept putting this down after each story so I wouldn't "use it up" too quickly. He has a lot of Montana culture nailed in these stories. Easily one of my favorite living Montana authors.

[Jeffrey · Rating 4 out of 5]

McGuane is a master of the short story. Good collection here.

[Matthew Eisenberg · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm a book snob. There are a few select people in my life from whom I will blindly accept book recommendations---meaning that I'll begin reading a book based on their recommendation alone---but I generally read several professional reviews before deciding which new book to begin. This method of selection has resulted in my enjoying the majority of books that I read, as evidenced by the fact that the average score of the books I've rated on goodreads is 3.75. Alas, sometimes the critical acclaim bestowed upon a book does not, in my opinion, match the reading experience. Such is the case with Thomas McGuane's Crow Fair.

Crow Fair consists of 17 short stories that take place in Montana. For the most part the stories are populated by ordinary people in ordinary circumstances. Four of them (The Casserole; An Old Man Who Liked To Fish; Prairie Girl; and Stars) are excellent. Most of the rest are just fine, and 2 or 3 are clunkers.

Bottom line, I do not understand the cause for critical acclaim. The book is just okay. And you, dear reader, deserve better than just okay. So I do not recommend it to you.

[Dave · Rating 4 out of 5]

Look, I think the world of Thomas McGuane's writing. He is by far my favorite author, and Crow Fair is further evidence why he should be considered one of America’s greatest novelists. But goddamn these stories are depressing. And I say that in the context of having read nearly everything McGuane has published. His characters, not in the habit of living their best lives, are the kind- seeing the bleak future waiting at the end of their trajectory- that either hit the gas pedal to reach that fatalistic endpoint or, occasionally, stumble upon ingenuous shortcuts to their doom. These short stories are well-written, rich with imagery, and generous with that acerbic, quick-witted dialog typical to McGuane’s characters. But this is brutal. Recommended, but brutal.

[Raymond · Rating 1 out of 5]

Ce livre n'était clairement pas pour moi. Je l'ai lu simplement pour me prouver que je pouvais tout de même passer au travers, malgré les incompatibilités entre moi et les histoires.

Ça manque de rythme, c'est difficile de s'attacher aux personnages tellement ils sont fades. Mise à part, peut-être, la dernière histoire (qui porte le titre du livre), les autres histoires sont ternes, à la limite endormantes, sans relief.

Désolé, je suis convaincu que cet auteur a du talent. Mais ce n'es pas mon genre de littérature, de toute évidence.

[Matt · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the finest collections of short stories I have read in a very long time. This is also my first encounter with Thomas McGuane, and I am delighted to make his acquaintance. Even though all of the stories are set in Montana, there is a universality about their presentation of what one reviewer calls "...awful, awfully human moments". Therein lies the beauty of the collection. (If you read this book for no other reason, read it for the last three pages of the story "A Long View To The West".)

[Zoe · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not a dull story in the collection! I like that his short stories have substantive plots (some are page turners, even!) so it doesn't feel like reading a collection of essays. River Camp was an absolute riot. I also really liked On a Dirt Road and The Good Samaritan (how does he come up with this stuff!). This stories are witty and absurd - a great combination that never fails to entertain me. This is the book where you keep feeling the impulse to read passages aloud to other people in the room because they are *that good*.

[Rob · Rating 4 out of 5]

Do you know this author's works? He flies under the radar for many people - but he's worth looking into. "Crow Fair" is not his best work .. but yet, these short stories certainly represent his style, humor, and guile as well as anything he's written. Living in Montana does that. After reading these stories, I suddenly have a craving to re-watch movies made from his books and stories - "Rancho Deluxe" and "The Missouri Breaks" come to mind ..