Cloudbursts (2018)
Thomas McGuane (1939)
556 pages
Life weighs heavily upon the characters in the forty-five short stories of Thomas McGuane’s collection Cloudbursts – they feel out of sync with their family and friends, their communities and the world in general. Whether raging against perceived unfairness and injustice, or succumbing to a forlorn hopelessness, all struggle to make their way through a seemingly unforgiving world. Though some are clearly – to borrow a phrase from the story The House on Sand Creek – “a bubble and a half off plumb” (283), others simply grapple with some combination of bad choices, limited opportunities and the vicissitudes of modern life; most remain perpetually slightly mystified by what happens to them.
Into the lives of these characters, McGuane introduces a sudden, defining moment – a cloudburst as it were. The stories become richly detailed character studies exploring how people already at best muddling through life fight to maintain their equilibrium in the face of an unexpected event, one that forces them to directly confront the personal social struggles and awkwardness they’ve mostly managed to ignore or repress. Despite the deep-seated melancholy and listlessness of the characters we meet, and the seeming hopelessness of the situations they find themselves in, McGuane’s sympathetic treatment of them allows us to feel compassion for their plight.
He sets the tone in the first story, Sportsmen, which opens with a boy spending the summer with a friend, hunting and fishing and generally trying to act grown up in the woods and riverfront near their homes – until a freak accident leaves his friend with a broken neck. The boy is sent away to a summer camp, and upon returning home visits his now wheelchair-bound friend, surprised to discover him surrounded by the aggressively hip students the two of them had always feared and avoided. The boy doggedly bides his time however, hoping to somehow reestablish the connection that had been lost.
In Motherlode, a young man who “was astonishingly uneducated in every respect, though clever in keeping an eye out for opportunity” has drifted into a “moderately successful” career helping ranchers with their cattle breeding, having taken an on-line course. When a stranger forces him at gun point to drive to an isolated house from which the stranger and his girlfriend partner are running opium, his ambivalence about his job and his life leaves him open to the temptation of a get rich quick scheme, and to ignoring all the potential warning signs associated with it.
Canyon Ferry introduces us to a divorced father who learned “only long after it mattered that [his wife and her lover] had been exhausting their erotic urgency over four vigorous years of infidelity prior to the separation.” Painfully aware that bringing his young son back to his place for visitations only reinforces that it isn’t home, he looks for outside activities to help them stay connected, and so one day buys the necessary equipment to go ice fishing. Despite his earnest intentions, his lack of understanding about the vagaries of the weather around the high mountain reservoir they head out onto results in the excursion nearly ending in disaster, only further alienating him from his son.
In many of these stories the characters fail to overcome the challenges of the losing hand life has dealt them, stymied by some combination of their own weaknesses and the situation they have landed in. But some do finally achieve moments of clarity. In Skirmish, a boy who must contend with the three brutish brothers from a neighboring house with whom he gets crosswise finds solace in the natural world, at one point finding
small painted and mud turtles whose cool weight in my hands and striving far-focused eyes thrilled me. The flare of the shell, the arrangement of openings for heads and legs, their symmetry and gleam of burnished camouflage, were aching to comprehend. (52)
More somberly, Clay, the main character in A Long View to the West, has spent a lifetime listening to his father’s stories, many repeated so often over the years that he knows the details and maintains a running dialogue about them in his thoughts as his father carries on. But, after a visit with his now dying father at the hospital in which he finds himself again enduring a story he’s heard many times before, he was suddenly
surprised to feel so shaken. He’d known when he’d brought his father [to the hospital] that it was the end of the trail, but hearing [his father] admit it reminded Clay that he was more frightened than his father was. Soon he would be gone and the stories with him. Maybe he’d be able to remember them during hard times or, really, whenever he needed them. Maybe he needed them now. (332)
McGuane mostly sets the stories in his current home state of Montana, though several take place near his birthplace of downriver Detroit, and a few others in Key West and elsewhere. And he describes these settings, whether towns or wilderness, with the same kind of careful detail he brings to his characters: as opposed to a generic ‘view of the mountains,’ he locates a house as “with a view of the Absarokas” or “out on Skunk Creek,” or sets a story on “Canyon Ferry Lake, an impoundment of the Missouri River” at “Confederate Gulch” where “the Big Belt Mountains rose against a blue sky marbled with cirrus clouds streaming toward them from the Gate of the Mountains,” all of these real locations in Montana. McGuane’s descriptions of setting ground his characters in specific places and times, giving us insight into the world in which their lives play out, whether deep in a majestic, if often unforgiving wilderness, or cooped up in a house that can barely contain their nervous energy.
Though moments of revelation occur throughout McGuane’s stories, often as not that hard won knowledge comes at a steep price for the characters. These are stories of hard scrabble lives, and though a few characters manage to find some measure of redemption and success for their travails, most fail in the critical moment, unable to overcome the limitations that have long colored their lives.
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