The Sporting Club

by Thomas McGuane

A hilarious novel about boyhood rivalries gone terribly wrong from the highly acclaimed author of Cloudbursts and Ninety-two in the Shade

Two old friends strike up an old feud filled with dangerous games on the vast preserve of their hunting club in this rollicking story of boyhood rivalries pushed to the limit.

McGuane is "a major American writer, one of the ... best of his generation" ( Time magazine).

Genres: Fiction, Novels, Literary Fiction, Humor, Literature, Modern

224 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1968

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

[Evan · Rating 4 out of 5]

(updates)
A tasty story. The author's first novel, published in 1968.
This is an odd, dark comic story. The locale shifts from the Detroit office where the protagonist Quinn is struggling to save the family auto parts-making business, to the decadent old hunting lodge in wooded northern Michigan where he and a friend-rival from childhood (Stanton) continue a sick and obsessive battle of testosterone wits and wills. The writing, thus far, has a certain flair. McGuane has a talent for description. There's a baroque, eccentric quality to the whole thing so far; waiting to see if he can pull this together in way that becomes compelling and pacy, so far it's a bit jagged. I may be off base, but it reminds me tad of the style of Terry Southern, even though my experience with him so far is very limited.

Wow, this Stanton is one of the most mean-spirited boors I've ever encountered in literature. A bully extraordinaire. Man, is he hateful, not in an outright angry way but in the kind of cocksure unhesitatingly witty way that is disarming and, to some, irresistibly charming. Naturally, it gets him women and at least one devoted, lifelong friend: Quinn. Their relationship is based on oneupsmanship: a kind of focal point of what the gentleman's sport club is really all about. The privileged members' resentment of the lowly groundskeeper, Olson, and his hunting prowess is spot-on and funny. The mere presence of a prole who is a better survivalist uncomfortably reminds the elites of their inferiority, is an affront to their manhood and sense of class superiority -- even though he is the best man for the job. He is a threat to the ego.

This is a book that tries hard not to be likeable, but I am fascinated by this story and these characters.

There, evidently, was a 1971 movie version, which Pauline Kael blasted.

UPDATE:
Third of the way in and as much as I'm fascinated by Stanton and the personal thrills that drive him to manipulate others, I'm still a little baffled by some of his games and McGuane's presentation of them. This book's quirkiness makes it a bit harder to engage than I'd like, but there's a unique authorial sensibility here that I admire and I will keep going.

Near HALFWAY:
Took a break and resumed this. I've been trying to figure out the word that best describes McGuane's style and tone in this book and perhaps "staccato" fits the effect of it. It's not avant garde or experimental or even complicated, perhaps skewed and baroque and unpredictable, and it kind of causes you to stop a bit and bump around. It's not smooth but jagged, and yet, as I say, it's not obscurantist. I'm still pondering the psychology that draws Quinn to the manipulating bully Stanton, and because Quinn seems to be a willing accomplice to Stanton's nonsense, it is Quinn, rather than Stanton, who seems the more reprehensible as the book goes on.

WELL INTO SECOND HALF:
I detect some "Confederacy of Dunces"-type quirky humor in it now; even some Evelyn Waugh-style dry humor as it examines the manners of the gentleman's club. (Somebody says "Evenin'." and the other replies, "What's evenin' about it?")

The replacement groundskeeper, Earl Olive, whose expertise is dealing in fishing bait, is a wonderful character. I love the section about the cookout. Stanton tries to explain his rationale for shaking up the club, trying to waken the pampered elites from their sleepwalking through life. There's some stuff to think about here, even if it's just an excuse for his insatiable hunger for control. I would have liked more description about Lu and about what Quinn thinks about making love to her, what her allure is, and so on. Anyway...

NEAR END:
In the home stretch on this and I have to say, this is a book with balls on; McGuane knows the operating principles of things. His mock history of the lodge, with all its convenient exclusions of the power plays and the robbery of the lower classes is just one sharp example. Olive, the violent rebel, is a product of this mercilessly exclusionary system. I think I'm going to revise up this rating -- because McGuane has a unique voice and the story is clever and potent, even if overwritten at times.

Final thoughts: Although a short novel, it took quite awhile to read this. But there's assurance in how it's written, and the trip is a memorable one. Weird, but worthy.

[Ned · Rating 3 out of 5]

Having lived for 2 years in Kalamazoo, Michigan, I have a certain affinity for stories about this state, in this case the second book for me set in the Upper Peninsula. This is my third McGuane, the first read back when I was a proud 30-year old, in a suffocating heat wave in rural Kentucky, awaiting the birth of my second-born. This one was McGuane’s first book, and it shows, it is overwritten to say the least. His brilliance is on display, too much so in my opinion, along with a thrilling plot-line and authentic characters. This book is divided into 3 sections, and for me it went from excellent to average to below average. But I don’t regret reading it one bit, there are lovely sections and dazzling vignettes, and a peculiar aspect to the narrator (the author as protagonist, surely, and unreliable). I can’t help but think of Jim Harrison, a true Michigander, as being a kinsman of McGuane. This book was written in 1968, but is set in that deceptively transitional period in the US, the 1950s. These were the years just before I was born, when the alternative lifestyles of the baby boomers were beginning to spread like wildfire across America. This book also reminded me of Peter Matthiessen’s Raditzer, which I vaguely remember being about a man and his rival, children of wealth in mortal intellectual and physical conflict. Oddly, this book hearkened T.C. Boyle (whom I have collected but not read in some time) in its outrageous, fantastical explosions as the story builds to a shocking climax. I’ll even throw in Harry Crews’ Feast of Snakes, which was a much more influential book on me, with it its explosively excessive finale and testosterone-fueled intensity.

As stated, I loved section one: James Quinn, the 30 something businessman from Detroit visits the Centennial sporting club in the wilds of the Upper Peninsula. Being the son of a member of the club, he now seeks the solitude and camaraderie of old friends, where they, as the newly gentrified, can hunt and fish on rich lands protected for their amusement. Right away we learn James has a foreboding that his boyhood friend and rival (“frenemy” anyone?) will be there for his month’s respite. This fear is based on their long history, with exploits well beyond youthful hijinks, involving felonies from foolish stunts. Having unexpectedly inherited his father’s tool die manufacturing business, upon his sudden death, James struggles with the mantel of unwanted respectability. His “friend” Vernor Stanton, on the other hand, has become wealthy to the point of never having to grow up. He’s over-educated, over-compensated, bored, and clearly mentally ill. Leaving a trail of friends and women, he arrives with his latest girlfriend, whom James immediately is attracted to. The first encounter is a duel, using one of Stanton’s dueling pistol sets, being a collector, but with wax instead of live bullets. James gets knocked on his ass, nonetheless, with a blast of wax to the chest. From this point it is “game on” for the two old “friends”. For solace, James fishes with the working-class manager of the club, who, though uneducated, is a genius with animals and fishing.

The troublemaking Stanton enjoys conflict and manly one up man shift, challenging all comers. It appears to be a death wish, as he wants to be broken. James has avoided his friend’s destiny yet cannot resist the challenge (youthful rivalries die hard). Stanton gets the manager fired by riling up his cronies (these are an eclectic set, and McGuane describes their many flaws and oddities wonderfully), but this backfires when the manager chooses his successor, Earl, a rough character who is supremely unqualified for the job. This is where the book loses me a bit, as the conflict seems to veer excessively into slapstick, yet oddly cerebral (as James relives his past, and the storied history with Stanton is woven in). Stanton does remind me of a college classmate, restless and marginally delusionally grand, still knocking about in the Mediterranean in a sailboat. The cerebral battle of wits, and James’ emerging culpability make this such a promising book, yet it foundered and flopped for me midbook.

I just found McGuane’s use of examples excessively frustrating (I got lost after 3 or 4, forgetting the flow of the story) and it seemed he was just showing off his impressive vocabulary and knowledge of literature, sporting, and the inner state of “modern” man.

I’m still I glad I read this, and my next one will be more current (Ninety-two in the Shade). I saw recently on social media that he’s now one of a few elder statesmen of the western, modern novels, and a fishing expert to boot. Being a fisherman myself, and nature lover, I can’t but help myself to more from this talented author.

[Ebenmaessiger · Rating 2 out of 5]

it’s my own fault. while a semi-randomized “next up”selection process can protect from samey-samey reading ruts, it can call forth its very own ruts just the same. meaning, after banging my head against the whack-a-mole erraticism of romain gary's THE GUILTY HEAD, id have done best to avoid SPORTING CLUB so soon after. yet, here i am just days later with a seat on another magical mystery tour of 60s countercultural irreverence. what im saying is that i wasn’t a generous reader here. so caveat lector and all.

the book is about the pampered residents of an elite michigan country club, battling against their own ennui, as well as the aggrieved yoopers amongst whom they find themselves. it's meant to a "comedic romp" (as are most of the things i bounce off of from this era). its episodic in its telling, moderately hallucinatory in its narrative sketchiness, and oft surreal in its incident and characterization. annoyed yet?

a shame for me to be so put off because there’s some interesting stuff here. there's such an evident, youthful revel in the possibilities of the moment seeping off the page, at the space opened up for a preening transgression, in both narrative content and presentation. and, to hand it especially to these late 60s rompers, there is a laudably consistent element of class critique in all aspects of their absurdist picar. none of it, for me, adds up to much, especially as the merry prankster sneer of the prose makes it hard to take the critique as sincere. there's no bite in the thing.

and there's no bite in its prose, either. here's a representative sliver of crescendoing language, as quinn, our protagonist considers the destruction befalling the club:

“If I could fly into the sky and watch through a spyglass: they're warring now, now there's peace, now anarchy, vengeances are loosed, plagues are loosed, flies are loosed and Quinn is away sailing across green into green, his green peeling from its green inside and I must have freedom and it is only that which will do. The swamps breed discontent and therefore bomb all moist places. Wendell Wilkie and the clear plastic tears of Mexican virgins implore you to sink giggling beneath consideration until all the beasts of the zodiac raid your poor brain. Remember that help yourself is a novel of please and that if you try too hard you will be seen to the door, your mind belly up and your hat in your hand. Life is a greedy railroad and that's an end on it. What is the future of man and his religions when scientists in a top secret laboratory have already constructed the first hydraulic nun? And which came first, the four-minute mile or the three-minute egg? What is the principle of selective bungling? How is it practiced? Quinn could no more answer than he could picture his own unconcern as he sat in this cool woodland listening to the honking and fluting of the unbridled lust of bankers and merchants. It was this, he thought: it was postcoital depression at institutional rates; it was a note from the world of excess; it was the dejected piping of a bourgeois gentilhomme; it was the squall of the ultima fool, the whimper of a magician with a trick knee; it was the bassoon section of a downhill parade all the way from lower left to the middle distance; men without views, true colors, bulk ambitions and high-speed dreams."

This your thing — cool! At the moment, though, it just makes me want to listen to that Deadbeats song about hippies.

[ron swegman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thomas McGuane's debut novel, first published in 1969, tells a unique story that in large part explores the friction between the Greatest Generation of World War II and the Baby Boom Generation of the Vietnam War. Two characters, one a loud young man of action, the other a quiet young man of rumination, find themselves at a fading old boy's sports club in Michigan during a summer vacation. There are some excellent scenes depicting outdoor sport, a female love interest who is warm blooded and well sketched, a local war with the nearby working class residents of the area, and an ending that is humorous to the point of absurdity. The language used throughout is erudite; a youthful novelist's display of verbal virtuosity that somehow does not distract from the substance of the story, which digs rather deep below the comic dialogue and other verbal veneer.

[Angus McKeogh · Rating 1 out of 5]

The back cover states "hilarious!!!". Don't believe it. I internally chuckled once in 220 pages. Well written and there're several McGuane books that I'm fond of, but this is not one of them. Tediously boring at best.

[Eric Kirkman · Rating 1 out of 5]

Took me three weeks to get through the last 20 pages. Very verbose and never seemed to get anywhere. Very not good.

[Grant Catton · Rating 2 out of 5]

I say this with all respect to Mcguane, cause I love his writing... This book is an amatuerish "first novel" that seems like it should have gone about three more drafts with an editor or probably not even been published. There are moments I remembered from 20 years ago when I read it the first time. But...reading it again all these years later, and as a writer myself, I marvel that this even got published.

The world he paints is fun to inhabit. But the stakes are not high enough, characters not fleshed out enough, tension not tense enough, humor not funny enough. Seems like McGuane was channeling the same kind of post-Hemingway era, drunken tough guy sportsman thing -- with a dash of 60s anti-estsblishment pranksterism -- that Hunter Thompson eventually turned into Gonzo Journalism. But here, it's just an amateurish attempt that can probably be forgotten, except by a PhD student doing a thesis on McGuane or 20th century sporting literature.

[H · Rating 3 out of 5]

Minor spoilers.

Probably not as good as the other McGuane books I've read but that doesn't mean it's not a lot of fun to read. As a first novel, it has some of the missteps you'd expect. Namely, Vernor Stanton doesn't fully work as the friend/enemy of hero Quinn, and the escalation of the catastrophes at the club (and the story as a whole) is a bit all over the place (including the final set piece involving Quinn and a machine gun). But in the end, McGuane makes up for these shortcomings with a great coda/"years-later ending" which upon rereading is actually quite unsettling ("Then someone invisible upstairs announced Stanton's bedtime"), and passages like this, where he's already worked out his lonely, one-of-a-kind perception at age 29:

He looked up to see Janey in the highest window. She beckoned and he trotted toward the house thinking, What in the name of God, can this be it? The steps sailed by three at a time and he was in the room. Janey waved him past to the window. He took the binoculars from her in disappointment and looked, moving them back and forth. Rivers of green poured into each eye. He elevated the glasses to the fissured brown of the lake. There he was. He was dancing on the lake bed with great seriousness, his jaw pressed against his chest, his underlip thrust out; he flapped his arms with a slow condor motion while his feet carried his scurrying in widening gyres. Suddenly, he threw his head back and Quinn was sure he imitated the cry of some raptorial bird. Then he put the rucksack back on and moved away with the heavy fluency of a prizefighter. The man's a loony, thought Quinn as he turned to Janey; will that clear the air? Scarcely. She thought it was funny. Quinn wanted to make her see that people didn't live like this; but what was the use. No one was going to get her away from Bird Man out there.

[Roswitha · Rating 3 out of 5]

Published in 1968 and set about a decade earlier, this book is a window into the soul of the post-Hemingway American novel -- a very particular slice of the American novel, masculine, brilliantly realized, casually misogynist, and dark. The enemy here is not fear itself, not nature in its brooding power, not even women in their brooding power. The enemy is social class and the self-loathing that wealth engenders in the even semi-self-aware. And the victor here is also social class, and in that, McGuane displays a not terribly uncanny prescience: the man with the most toys is going to win, whether he really gives a damn or not. What saves the whole enterprise from cynicism is that, on his way to winning, the man with the most toys is going to see to it that the other members of his social class, the ones just slightly beneath him, get exactly the drubbing they deserve, while a few innocent bystanders get maybe a little more. Unlike Hemingway, McGuane is very funny. You'll emerge blinking from the depths his prose drags you into, and also shaking your head because these people are still running the show, only nobody bothers to write novels about them anymore. Or perhaps nobody with the talent of Thomas McGuane is sitting close enough to the throne.

[Pattie O'Donnell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tom McGuane is a marvel. I'll start reading a story in the New Yorker without looking to see who wrote it, and I'll think "wow, this is Tom McGuane Good" and of course, it's McGuane. He writes like a guy, for guys and about guys, but I still love his stuff (not something I'd say about Cormac McCarthy or Philip Roth, who I think you have to be male to really appreciate).

His stories are very funny, but also deeply sad. His characters are quirky and original and sincere and do really stupid things.

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is not a good book. I have read a lot of Tom McGuane's books and like most of them. I recently fished the Pere Marquette and realized that I had never read this, his debut novel, which is set there. That itself is worth one star. I also had a lifelong friend much like Stanton, a loud-mouthed, brilliantly clever but narcissistic know-it-all who was a lot of fun to be around until it wasn't anymore. So that was worth another star. The book on its own was worth only one star as it was a lot like that old friend, so that's why I gave it three.

[Tom Romig · Rating 5 out of 5]

A novel so demonically hilarious that you almost forget it's about the meaningless core of life. Stanton struggles to find point and purpose of being, if not in the present then perhaps in codes of the past. Nothing sustains, nothing suffices, so his only recourse is to succumb to madness as the fitting response to the chaos of existence. As always, McGuane's writing is a thing of beauty. (For the record, this is my fifth reading of the novel, the first being 45 years ago.)

[Dave Peraza · Rating 2 out of 5]

Enjoyed his descriptive writing, and the quirky characters, but the story was boring. Like a baseball game, even when something exciting happened, it was still boring.

[Tim O'Leary · Rating 2 out of 5]

Growing up in Michigan as a dyed-in-the-wool outdoorsman, and deferring to the genre of a type where the male ethos exploits competitive relationships which define a Hemingwayesque pecker...er...pecking order among siblings and compatriots, and enemies, and where mating rights (or lack of them) is a product of said rivaly, thought this--being McGuane's first novel--would be a read worth a star or two more than is shown. There are scattered incidences, such as the duelling in a rich guy's basement man-cave, however, that are just too far fetched as a defining contrivance within the machismo plot structure. Seriously. Anybody who's ever been shot at close range with a paintball gun, especially in the face--where it penetrated under the mask and lacerated my jaw--bleed like you mean it--well, let's just say you'll forgo the experience a second time. And something about the lascivious nature of spontaneous, random sex with a wanton slut who takes her false teeth out <"her chin is under that nose--that face is trying to smile--that face thinks this (this public sex act) is funny. "Keep it upp," she gummed impassively," >and other details equally depraved, deranged, and decidely off-putting--a Kodak moment, literally. Especially when a time-capsule is ceremoniously dug up on July 4th a century later when the original founders of the Club have their little joke on their progeny. Granted McGuane, like a rookie overacting a bit-part in a movie, is working so hard to be hillarious (mooning nuns, really?) and it...well, in the theme of duelling if you will, it is so over-the-top, missing badly. One of the better rich-guy fraternity pranks (raison d'etre for most of the book) takes place at the dedication of the opening of the Mackinac Bridge. A tour bus parked on Big Mac near the podium for the governor and his fat cat donor friends and their entourage of beauty queens and Shriners is stolen by our protagonists who make the celebrities and notables of the occasion hoof it back to the other side. <"We bitched them good," said Stanton (first name Vernor--an iconic name for ginger ale in the Mitten State) pushing the outermost levers forwards (making good their escape in his holystoned (?) teak-planked yacht).> Hahaha. The fraternal order of rich-guy pranksters having their way with commoners for shits and grins. It was probably hysterical. You just had to be there. And that, dear friends, is why I've never been a party to country clubs of any description, sniffling and chuckling and gossiping loosely under their gin-stuporous breath from one too many martinis. Pity the teen caddies who have to endure the uglier temperaments of a member having an off day on the links. The Sporting Club, indeed.

[Timbabwe Sz · Rating 4 out of 5]

I had a Harry Dean Stanton retrospective last weekend, both films written by Thomas McGuane.
Finally watched The Missouri Breaks (with the ending of Paris, Texas on youTube as a short subject) and finished up with Rancho Deluxe.

The Missouri Breaks is basically a big-budget remake of Rancho Deluxe, with Nicholson and Brando taking the parts played by Jeff Bridges and Slim Pickens. Slacker cattle rustlers are tracked and captured by an oddball stock detective in both.

RD is far superior. The Montana scenery is the major star, occasionally upstaged by mumbling actors blocking the view.

It inspired me to dust off The Sporting Club and read it again. Two young men in northern Michigan visit the hunting club founded by their great-grandfathers. In the first scene, Stanton goads Quinn into a mock duel, with antique pistols, firing wax bullets. It hurts like hell.

Their games grow more menacing through the novel.

(I had to look up several words in the first twenty pages: rentier, frangible, defenestration, platyl and consult a youTube video on how to tie a fly-fishing May Fly lure from a pheasant feather. That's usually a good sign: obscure words, precisely used, with no better, simpler substitute).

[Sharon · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thomas McGuane is a funny writer, a pleasing storyteller, who used to pair well with Kesey and Joseph Heller back in the seventies. He is worth a re-visit in 2021, I guess, especially if you find a novel like The Sporting Club in a used book store.

McGuane is still funny. Like all the books and movies that came out around 1970, the climax of the story goes overboard and pandemonium gets way out of hand near the end. So it goes with The Sporting Club--bonkers ending way overdone.

I have another bone to pick with McGuane on this one. He is supposedly born and raised in Michigan, yet he somehow misses the Yooper essence of the Upper Peninsula characters. The local groundskeeper who masterminds the downfall of the club, talks with a hillbilly accent. Not right, eh?

[Meredith Tyler · Rating 3 out of 5]

I’m struggling with what to write on this one. There is something that I really enjoy about McGuane’s writing, clever, well worded, good turn of phrase:

Behind the two, just unloaded from the club’s twin-engined Beechcraft, loomed Quinn’s gear. Quinn was here to rest and that always seemed to require a lot of equipment;

But something doesn’t quite hit. Maybe it’s the overblown ending that tries to shock, but almost 60 years since being written doesn’t have the same punch. Or perhaps it’s not connecting with the main character again, one wants to like Quinn, but little redeems him.

I’ve read that Sporting Club isn’t mcGuane’s best. Perhaps I’ll give him one more try!

[Terry · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sporting Club reminded me of Lord of the Flies as Thomas Pynchon would have recorded it. Quinn is the foil but his old friend Vernor is the anti-hero and main character. Vernor sets about dismantling an exclusive sporting club during a summer anniversary week while the club is full of local notables. Vernor is what today we would label mentally unstable and depressed but he wears the public face of a rebel. Quinn mostly holds back Vernor's ambitions. The manner in which the story is told makes for an entertaining read.

[Noli Janos · Rating 3 out of 5]

SPOILER: the end brought on a nabokov / apocolypse now 'what the hell is going on' feeling to it. same as other reviewers, mcguane is the man. actually my favorite, this isnt his pinnacle but still good enough to get through easily enough.

[Joelove9 · Rating 3 out of 5]

McGuane is great, to varying degrees.
p190. "it was a forlorn sound, and reminded Quinn of the noise that must have been made by those animals that were in the transitional phase between birds and reptiles."

[Steve Barney · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting and quirky. Enjoyed watching the odd relationship play out between Quinn and Stanton primarily, and with Janey, Fortesque, Earl Olive and others.

[Roger Rosenberg · Rating 3 out of 5]

Funny yet very sinister. An entertainer read.

[Sam Reich]

So funny - and beautiful English prose as well-

[Alan · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Quinn knew that if you played patty cake with Stanton he would soon be all over you.” Quinn is a mild-mannered, decent guy who retreats to the trout stream when things get a bit dicey. I like that. Stanton is his best friend, rival and id. Like Gene and Phineas from A Separate Peace, it’s a complicated relationship. McGuane writes about what it is to be a man in a way that suits me well. His characters have more facets than Cormac McCarthy’s stoic loners and his early novels are wry and occasionally laugh out loud funny.

[Chr*s Browning · Rating 2 out of 5]

twenty one year olds used to be so much older than i am at twenty five

[Jeffrey Ross · Rating 3 out of 5]

Love his writing but what a weird ending

[Neil Troost · Rating 2 out of 5]

hilarious? nope. tedious? yes. some interesting parts. a bit unfocused. odd.

[Greg Halvorson · Rating 5 out of 5]

McGuane is the ultimate wordsmith, a bold literary cowboy, which, as you can glean from the “I don’t get it” reviews, makes him unique and challenging… And like a cowboy, he doesn’t care.

[Paul · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was okay. I mean, it was enjoyable the whole way through, and a fast read, but I liked The Cadence of Grass a lot better. This one suffers from (or anyway, what bugged me was) a boisterous, attention-hogging antagonist meant to, well, antagonize the protagonist though they're friends and share a long history. How are we, the reader, meant to take this antagonist if the narrator can't really stand him? I don't know that McGuane gives him enough of a good side to make him interesting or not-annoying (or, perhaps, three-dimensional). This is a humorous (i.e. comical) book, though, so a lot of the "rules" are different. Yes, it's funny, and at times very funny. One of the coolest openings I've ever read. But, the end kind of dissolves into absurdist melee, and my attention flagged a bunch. I'll keep reading McGuane, but this wasn't spectacular despite its reputation.

[Kevin Carroll · Rating 3 out of 5]

I first heard of this book when I was reading an interview with Carl Hiassen (one of my favorite authors.) The first part of this book was slow going and it was due in part to the fact that McGuane writes in very good prose and not knowing a word every couple of pages bothered me enough to the point that I had to look them up. Keeping the context of the book in mind it got much easier to read and enjoy the further along I got. Especially the last 1/3 of the book, where there are some really hilarious passages. It was clear that McGuane's style influence Hiassen's writing. I give this book a 3 star rating only because I am not old enough to fully appreciate the time frame in which the story takes place. But I felt satisfied at the end and I always appreciate anarchy in any story.