Gallatin County
by Thomas McGuane
I've read almost everything by Thomas McGuane. It started with The Bushwhacked Piano back in the 1980's and has continued over the years. Nancy even recently found several old paperbacks of McGuanes writing and bought them for me including Ninety-Two in the Shade and Panama. To say I'm a fan is an understatement. I've always been attracted to the offbeat characters, but more than that I've been attracted to the landscapes of the West that he writes about. Besides, anyone once married to crazy Margot Kidder during her cocaine days deserves to at least have his stories read.
Gallatin County is a collection of short stories that carry on the McGuane tradition of odd characters in Western U.S. settings. However the book does have a couple of stories that have nothing to do with the West. Ice is about a kid who tries to skate from Michigan to Canada across a Great Lake. He flirts with death and finds out a secret in the process. The Refugee centers around a figure who has several dark secrets and sails back to Key West to confront them. Miracle Boy explores a back East family confronting the death of their matriarch and the faith they put in their youngest relative to bond the family back together.
While these are all great stories written with undeniable craft, I tend to gravitate towards those that center around Montana and Big Sky country in general. These are the stories that I loved twenty years ago when I was riding towboats and had a lot of reading time on my hands and they are the stories that draw me back to McGuane today. For those of you that love short stories and understand the craft that is needed to produce really good ones, I highly recommend Gallatin County.
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