Keep the Change

by Thomas McGuane

An American odyssey - one man's picaresque quest for his roots and his rightful inheritance, involving sex, slapstick violence and romance. The author's previous novels include "The Sporting Club" and "The Bushwacked Piano", and he has also written a collection of short stories.

Genres: Fiction, Literary Fiction, Literature, Novels

230 pages, Hardcover

First published September 1, 1989

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

[Adam Dalva · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is my first McGuane novel, and it turned out to be a wonderful surprise: lively, inventive, and very, very funny. The plot is good and varied - Joe Starling, failed painter, goes home to work on the ranch his father wanted him to have and faces various ghosts from his past - but it's much more madcap and weird than the description might make it sound. It's a rare book where punch-lines like

"'And B,' said Astrid, 'it's time you potty-trained your mind. Especially as it relates to me and my activities.'
He didn't dare ask what A was."

can co-exist with lines like

"The pastures stretched out in a folding world of grassy hills until they disappeared into the bluing of faraway sky."

That variety is representative. The humor here is constantly mingled with a genuine, aching writing of the American west. I tend to resist, just a bit, the McMurtry and Harrison schools, but this is more comparable to Barry Hannah, and funnier. The novel has a classical plot, but subverts it every turn, as in this scene, a major conflict over a lease, possibly criminal. Joe is early and has tested out some colognes at a mall:

"Yes," said Bowen decisively, suddenly wrinkling his nose. "Is that you? What is that?" Then Joe understood.
"Canoe."
"You what."
Canoe. It's a cologne. And a couple of others. Musk was one."
"Would you be offended if I opened a window?"
"Not at all."
Bowen got up and struggled with the window behind his desk without freeing it. "I'm gonna end up with a fucking hernia-"
"Here, let me help."
They got on either side of the window and heaved upwards as hard as they could. Bowen pulled his face to one side..."It's not as if it was some kind of animal droppings, Joe said.
The bottom of the window casement tore free; wood fragments and dried putty flew across Bowen's desk. His finger was bleeding.

There are 10 scenes at least that funny, and McGuane's writing on failure and love was often insightful, as were the pleasure of the machinations of the ranch. The plot unfortunately falls apart in the second half, and some characters that initially feel complex get over-simplified, but I flew through this, and I'm excited to read more.

[Zuberino · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you want to feel the raw grain of American fiction in the 1980s under your fingertips, there is simply no better way than to read your way through the Vintage Contemporaries, that iconic series of paperbacks that made such a splash at the time, as much with its content as with its form. Even today, if I happen to spot one of these beautiful spines on the shelves of a secondhand bookstore, I will pick it up sight unseen, with the confident assurance of an interesting and/or entertaining read. A couple of years ago, I went to a Jay McInerney talk here in the city, and the one question I asked him was about the Vintage edition of Big City, Bright Lights, in particular that striking cover illustration that even then stood out as such a potent symbol of Am Lit in the Age of Reagan. Turns out Jay Mac owns the original illustration now!

So that when it came time to reboot my reading for 2018, I looked at my stack of VCs sitting there all together on the bottom rack of my American Fiction shelf, and thought to myself why not, let's kick off with some Tom McGuane. Alongside McMurtry and McCarthy, McGuane is one of those writers closely identified with the contemporary American West, attempting to explain a once mythic landscape now struggling to find its place in the modern world. In this task, the three Macs have been joined by writers as varied as Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner and Norman Maclean, not to mention a host of female and Native American voices. Though that infinite beauty cannot really be caught in words, these folks all give it a good whirl anyway.

*

I enjoyed Keep the Change. Through the character of young Joe Starling and his vacillating attachment to a little patch of Montana prairie, McGuane illustrates the difficulties of maintaining a way of life that never really made it past the days of the early pioneers. Now it's all about the hard grind of dealing with the vagaries of weather and disease and government regulation, even as the average rancher is tossed and turned by forces far beyond his control - the commodities futures markets in faraway Chicago, or the uncertain demand for beef at a global scale. Ranches go bankrupt, communities struggle, the sons of the soil abandon the land. Still, Joe Starling - Yale alumnus and failed artist - flees Florida in his Cuban girlfriend's stolen auto in a truly epic cross-country drive and returns to Montana, simply because no other place feels like home.

After that bravura opening, McGuane's reluctant hero settles down for a season of ranching and raising yearling cattle in the Montana grasslands, all while juggling his relationships with a range of types - flames past and present, childhood bullies, friendly bankers and unfriendly neighbours, wily aunties and drunken uncles, a mangy flea-ridden dog, and above all his father's ghost always present in the background. McGuane's angular yet graceful prose style is somehow perfectly suited to his material - it can outline the impossible grandeur of the land in a few handy brush strokes even as it describes the dysfunctional scratchings of the stoic folks populating it.

Ultimately it must all come to nought but Joe must give it the old college try first. Barring a seriously misjudged car chase, the denouement ties up all the loose ends fairly neatly, bar of course the biggest loose end of them all. I look forward to reading more McGuane, and soon.

PS His take on the rise of the Chinese at the expense of the Japanese, written thirty years ago around the time of Tiananmen, is breathtakingly spot on!

[Lawrence Leporte · Rating 4 out of 5]

I imagine a literary agent. A Hollywood-stock character in his late sixties with big, plastic-framed glasses, sitting in a crummy office in Manhattan or Burbank and barking into the telephone: “Tommy, I love you like a brother but the critics are bustin' my balls. They want a story. If I'm gonna sell you to the Prozac crowd then for Chrissake you gotta gimme some plot!”

And then, flustered: “Hang on a minute Tommy, I got Danielle Steel on the other line.”

When it came out in 1989, at least one professional reviewer applauded Keep the Change as evidence of a 'new maturity' in McGuane. The man had calmed down. He'd discovered the virtues of plot and continuity. He'd attended the workshops on Building Believable Characters.

And he'd given us a genuine hero, Joe Starling. Clearly, McGuane had decided to play by the rules. Starling seems a can-do kind of a guy. He puts his back into a few things. He repairs fences. He scrapes together some cash and assembles a motley herd of cattle. We almost warm to Joe Starling.

Almost. Except that:

. . . Joe got out of school, moved to New York, and became a successful painter. . . . The next thing he knew, he couldn't paint. It didn't seem all that subtle psychologically; and he had a good grasp of it. He had always painted from memory, and for some reason he couldn't seem to remember much of late.

And then:

He thought the pain of his love for Astrid would be more than he could stand.

Oh dear.

The complex artistic type, or an ineffectual crybaby who manages just enough gumption to play a passable game of checkers with his family's land interests? I found myself not caring much one way or the other, but gravitating maybe slightly towards the latter.

Fortunately, there is also Ivan Slater, a typically splendid McGuane entrepreneur:

He wore a blousy Cuban shirt and rolled his pants up in some ghastly sartorial reference to peasantry; instead of appropriate sandals or huaraches, he wore the lace-up black street shoes of his more accustomed venues in New York.

A sunny optimist (as any entrepreneur must be), but a practical one, Ivan's advice on serial dating is rock-solid:

. . . the more indistinguishable they get, the more its like having some show dog in your pants that can't live on ordinary kibble.

Now we're talking. Ivan's evening out with Starling in Miami and their dinner at the Yale Club are, without a doubt, some of the book's best moments. The new maturity might not be quite as dire as it sounds.

Starling has two love interests. One is Ellen, a general-purpose small-town girl with vocabulary and IQ that can be stretched or shrunk to suit the scene in question - the sort of character who's as handy and useful to the writer as poly-filler is to the guy who installs plaster-board.

The other is Astrid. Now here's a woman. My goodness am I sweet on her (and yeah, I think I could probably bear the pain). It's embarrassing, really - steady on, dude, she's a made-up person in a book.

The plot is, to be sure, a tidy and satisfying one. There may even be a sort of moral to the story. I like that.

I also appreciate McGuane's obvious regard for prairie or grazing grasses. For whatever reason, I too have an interest in meadow grasses and weeds, and it's an enthusiasm that rarely finds its way into modern fiction.

Overall, I'd put the book at the lower end of the scale for McGuane. But that said, I've never regretted reading anything he's written.

[Corey · Rating 4 out of 5]

I hadn't read him in ages. It was good to be back in McGuane country again.

[Patrick Gibson · Rating 3 out of 5]

It seems to me there was a time when McGuane’s early novels from the 70’s were everywhere. I remember at the college bookstore there were pervasive copies of ‘The Bushwacked Piano’ and ‘Nobody’s Angel.' Even in the reference section, no doubt. From sheer dominance and staying power I ended up reading both—then wondering what the fuss was all about. After 18 years of an eastern seaboard education (I started with kindergarten, didn’t you?) I crossed the Mississippi and eventually discovered the West McGuane, McMurtry, and Cormac McCarthy write so passionately about. I took the gauntlet of other writers at the time and let Thomas McGuane slip from my memory—until I came across ‘Keep the Change’ in my favorite used book store. This was a nice reintroduction to a writer who deserves more exposure in the 21st century. As a time capsule reflecting the Regan years, seen though the particularly sardonic quirky attitudes of Montana, Oklahoma and Texans, this novel is perfect in capturing the mores of the time. That last sentence made sense in my mind even though not so much in print—but you know what I mean. McGuane’s prose is austere, sometimes harsh, like the landscapes and the economic struggles of ranching in the last quarter of the century. His characters are unlikeable, yet believable and often perplexing in their coldness towards each other. They damage themselves emotionally and retreat into isolated arid personalities. While no where near the wallop of McMurtry’s ‘The Last Picture Show,’ ‘Keep the Change’ has a similar desolate feel to it. The blurb on the back said something about the novel being “hilarious.” My electrolytes must have been off when I read the book because I found no hilarity at all. I did find a novel of substance, beautifully conceived, and eloquently written. But not hilarious.

[Ron · Rating 4 out of 5]

While Montana is cast as "the last best place" by many of its writers, McGuane seems to see the place as a land of lost hope and illusion. Knee deep in ironies, the story turns in many ways on a faded painting in an abandoned ranch house that Joe, the main character, remembers from boyhood. Grown up now and a painter himself, who doesn't paint anymore, he abandons a Cuban girlfriend in Florida and fetches up after a cross country drive at the old home ranch to spend a season fattening cattle for market while having no faith that much of anything will happen to give his life any direction or purpose.

While most of this story takes place in Montana and most of its characters are nominally Montanans, they seem unmoored not only to the land but to any reason for being there. Those who come from elsewhere tire of it and leave. Those who would leave can't. Only a land-hungry rancher Overstreet seems to have a purpose in life, and it's clearly an empty one - buying up more land.

An old girlfriend figures in the story, and her jealous husband, and there are family members who are able to betray each other, and do. The relations between men and women swing wildly between romance and erotic encounters to bitterness. Greed lurks darkly everywhere. It's a vision not unlike the one in Larry McMurtry's "Texasville." His Duane is a distant cousin of Joe, and it's easy to imagine Jeff Bridges in a movie version of the story - beleaguered and wryly puzzled by what's become of his life. I recommend this novel to anyone ready for an anti-romance about the West, which questions - often humorously and outrageously - most of what the West has stood for in the American imagination.

[Melinda Seifert · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great Book. But then, I haven't read anything by Thomas McGuane that I haven't loved!

[Emi Yoshida · Rating 3 out of 5]

I didn't really understand main character Joe Starling's flighty motivations (or those of other characters either: his childhood friends, love interests, and family members). Still and all, it made for a nice American Western read, with lots of brilliant turns of phrase.

[Christy Leonardo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another stunner from the master. Each McGuane is a new tread on a trusted wheel.

[Chas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Possibly McGuane's best novel. Or maybe tied with Nothing But Blue Skies. I love his humor, sense of irony and keen character perception.

[Will · Rating 5 out of 5]

A gem of a novel: expansive in scope but economically told. Gorgeously understated writing with crackling dialogue and a deep undercurrent of wistfulness.

[Celeste · Rating 5 out of 5]

My favorite mcguane <3

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

The best way I can describe this book, and McGuane's writing in general, is "amiable." That sounds like a double-edged compliment, and I suppose it is, but it doesn't keep me from believing McGuane is a great writer. Let me elaborate: "Keep the Change" is a pleasant novel. I felt happy reading it. What I didn't feel was conflicted or heavily invested. McGuane is masterful at naming things, providing details, and description. He spends the early sections describing in detail the protagonist's drive from Florida to Montana. There are moments I put the book down and shook my head in wonder at his talent, as when he described the "serrated" edges of the distant mountains. In "Keep the Change," he describes ranching, as he does in other books, with convincing detail. But what I find about McGuane's books, including this one, is that the protagonists just let the action, such that it is, come to them. They are indecisive, always wise-cracking. Joe Starling is the protagonist here. He grows up on a ranch, goes off to Yale, becomes a painter before losing interest, meets a beautiful Cuban woman, Astrid, in Florida, then returns to Montana to ranch his birthright. He isn't sure what, or whom, he wants. There's a woman, Ellen, in Montana from Joe's past, but she's married with a child that may or may not be Joe's. I didn't care too much what ultimately happened to Joe or whom he ended up with. Even when the characters are careening at full speed down a gravel road, they're joking with one another. Nothing (other than the mountains) has any edge to it. McGuane has been praised for his dialogue, which is good the way Mamet dialogue is good: every character sounds the same and nobody sounds like a real-life human being. Again, it's nice writing but it doesn't give the story an air of reality. McGuane wraps things up very succinctly in the last three chapters, as though he grew tired of the story he was telling. He writes about money (which too few writers do) and about working people, and he does so lyrically. I just wish he wasn't always standing outside it all, smirking. When Joe resolves the various conflicts in his life, he seems to do so out of pity for those around him. He is giving them gifts, whether deserved or not, so that the conflicts seem staged. All this makes it sound like I didn't like "Keep the Change," but the reverse is true. I liked it a great deal, and there were numerous times I laughed out loud. McGuane is a witty, funny, lyrical writer, and his powers of observation are unsurpassed.

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

After making my introduction to Thomas McGuane through his short story collection, Crow Fair, I decided to take on my first full work of his with Keep The Change. First published in 1989, this novel is one of McGuane’s later works that takes place in Montana. While I enjoyed elements of this book, I still felt this was a lacking work in the same way that I felt with Crow Fair.

When you look at summaries of this book they are very vague and limited and after reading I kind of see why. There is a narrative here but I didn’t find that it was very detailed or engaging. Our protagonist, Joe returns to the ranch his family owned in Montana and reconnects with his life and relationships from his time living there.

This character is both generic enough for readers to apply themselves to and aspirational enough to an idyllic male idealism. For the most part it I just found this not a very interesting character to read. I don’t think there is anything inherently wrong with the idealism aspect but I did feel like it was a bit over the top at times (The character being a cool headed, smooth talking, hard working, rancher who just so happens to have stepped away from a job at the Space Center).

For being a novel I found this book felt quite similar to the short story collection I read. Many of these chapters felt like short vignettes that would focus on different scenarios or characters. Ultimately, it was still centralized around a broader narrative but often times this felt very disjointed and loosely timed together. This made for an easy read while traveling but hard to really enjoy as a book as a whole.

I did enjoy McGuane’s writing style. There are some great sentences here and the depictions of scenes are really enjoyable in their descriptive detail. The highlight of this book being a chapter that ends with a description of an Alberta mall that ultimately is just a radio news program playing in the background of the two actual characters we are following.

I read this book during a trip to Montana and it really was the perfect fit. Having visited many of the places in this novel really enhanced the experience for me as many of the scenes and scenarios felt like things I was actually doing.

While this book as a whole was another miss for me in terms of finding the right McGuane book for me, one that I would recommend to others, I still feel compelled to keep reading his work to find what does.

[Aren LeBrun · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thomas McGuane's novels fall into two general categories, both in terms of style and chronology. His early work ("The Sporting Club," "The Bushwhacked Piano," "Ninety-Two in the Shade," "Panama," and, to a certain extent, "Nobody's Angel") are characterized by a high wire literary absurdism that skewers U.S. commercial capitalism and bourgeois society in general. His protagonists tend to be charming, depressed, self-destructive, overeducated men committed to little else beyond seducing a beautiful woman whose parents don't like him (usually for good reason) and revolting against the otherwise intolerable stupidity of life itself. These novels are spectacularly well-written and inspired a reviewer to imbue him with "near Faulknerian potential."

His later work is more conventional. I read an interview in which McGuane refers to these early novels as "language-driven" (as opposed to character or plot driven) in a way he came to feel was sophomoric or less worthwhile than the leaner, straightforward prose he adopted for his later work, of which "Keep the Change" is more or less a perfect representative. Here you still have self-destructive male behavior, rejection of U.S. cultural mores, ironic dialogue, commercial white noise, and tragic material pursuits, but packaged in a clean-cut, conventional, Age of Eisenhower type manner that is a real let-down for readers who know what this guy can really do.

While you still encounter some classic McGuane depth and absurdity here (Joe Starling forsaking his considerable artistic abilities to instead paint illustrations for meaningless products peddled by his childhood friend and manic entrepreneur, all in an effort to render himself "more replaceable"...perhaps a self-referential licking of the wounds after the lashing received for "Panama"), I still found "Keep the Change" wanting of the rhetorical mastery that characterized McGuane's earlier work, which at points – "Bushwhacked Piano" and "Ninety-Two in the Shade" in particular – rose to the level of Gaddis, Barth, DeLillo, and Pynchon.

[Leonard Kaufmann · Rating 4 out of 5]

The image of the white hills, the framed picture of nothing on the white adobe textured wall, really sticks with you. Thinking how the main character first saw the picture, his father said that it sure was nice but a bit faded, while he didn't realize his father was joking. He went on to make a non-career of painting, probably on the basis of that non-picture, with his most famous work being a plagerism of that painting. The whole theme seems to be something along the line of striving for something, you don't quite know what, until you achieve it, then finding out all along that it was a futile, false sort of a goal, you've been tricked, but you move on to the next milestone anyway. His work, his women, his life all seemed to go that way. He grew up in Montana, moved to NY, Florida, then tried to go back to Montana and the ranch. He again met his high school love, his first, and she lied to him about a daughter that wasn't his, and she ended up back with her hubby. He stayed at the ranch, raised cattle and sold them. His wife found him in Montana and tried to stay with him there, but she went back to NY. He tried to take his girl to see the white hills, after finding out how false they were, but ended up in a silly chase scene, at the end making up with his rival and giving him the ranch while going to his wife in NY. Heck of a story, excellent and eccentric characters, hidden meanings, interesting themes of life lost and lost again. And I liked it.

[Paul Forrest · Rating 4 out of 5]

Having read Panama 30 years ago, re-reading recently confirmed my memory of it being a great novella in a Pynchon like mode. Like Panama's Florida Keys, there's a very strong sense of place, in this case, Montana, where the author also happened to live. The book is about family and loss and has some very fine descriptive writing. The plot, such as it is, is about the protagonist coming to terms with his past.It ends with a satisfying, low key twist, that I didn't see coming.

[Thomas McDade · Rating 4 out of 5]

"McGuane makes what could have been an indecipherable personal quest into a vivid, even suspenseful story, in language that seems to have been stripped clean of excess, reduced to only the most evocative descriptions and accurate emotions. Even for a writer of his standing, a novel as unfaltering as this one is a rarity."
-Publishers Weekly

Not quite.

[Tyler Mac · Rating 4 out of 5]

So misunderstood by those leaving reviews here. It isn't 92 In the Shade. It does have amazing, touching, poetry-worthy one-liners. It's Thomas McGuane. The more obvious narrative structure gives his heavy lines a new feeling. Get with the program, Goodreads.

[Sue Bridehead (A Pseudonym) · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really enjoy his short stories but had never read any of McGuane's novels. I liked the nature descriptions here, but the plot didn't grab me.

[Muriel · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked this story just because it was a story, no mystery or history.

[Noli Janos · Rating 4 out of 5]

classic Tom

[Secret List of Books]

McGuane is always interesting.

[Ralph · Rating 3 out of 5]

A bit odd. 3 stars max.

[DJ Rybski · Rating 4 out of 5]

I like McGuane. Good story. Interesting ending

[jimmy cobb · Rating 3 out of 5]

a very, very mild McGuane. you can tell it’s an early novel that lacks depth in many directions. not a bad read, a quick one too, makes me want to read a solid Harrison.

[Mary Dayhoff · Rating 3 out of 5]

Everything he wrote about the landscape, the lifestyle was spot on, then he lost me with the character's mental wandering.

[Tomas · Rating 3 out of 5]

Det som blir kvar. Läst på svenska.

[Nzayisenga Syliaque · Rating 3 out of 5]

summary

[Danielle]

Interesting enough for me to read once all the way through, though I did contemplate not finishing a few times, but not one I'll need to read again. I'm always looking for books like A River Runs Through It that really portray the essence of the Rocky Mountain area. But this book just didn't do that for me. One exchange came close, but still not quite there:
"But this country, it's the big romance in your life, isn't it?"
"For what it's worth."
"The mountains?"
"I don't particularly like the mountains," said Joe.
"You like all that other stuff. The stuff that doesn't look like anything. The prairie."
"Yep"
It's not the part about the mountains here (I personally adore the western mountains), but the description of the prairie that tugs at me.

Joe doesn't know what he wants to be when he grows up. Starts as an artist, even though it causes a rift with his father, who wants him to go into business and take over their Montana ranch. He falls half-heartedly in love with the neighbor cowgirl, but leaves for the East coast after a summer working the ranch, which is now in the hands of his father's sister and brother. Lureen and Smitty are ostensibly holding the ranch for Joe, but Smitty keeps squirreling away the lease money.

Joe ends up in Florida, no longer painting, but now drawing illustrations for the manuals for his friend Ivan's ever crazier inventions. As the lease money from the ranch stops coming in, and Ivan's inventions get more and more impractical, Joe steals his girlfriend's car and returns to MT to work on the ranch. Astrid follows him, and they play a half-hearted game of playing house, while Joe raises a mishmash herd of yearlings to pay for the ranch. Even though Lureen signs over the deed to Joe, Smitty still ends up with the money, and Joe faces losing the ranch.

Ellen, the neighboring cowgirl, has married Joe's childhood friend Billy. Ellen's father has always coveted Joe's ranch because it will complete his property's perfect square; he's chafed at having a chunk bitten out of it for longer than Joe's been alive. When Astrid leaves, no longer able to handle MT, and Joe is facing losing the ranch, he finally signs the deed over to Ellen and Billy as one final "screw you" to Ellen's father.