Thomas McGuane -- Gallatin Canyon

Gallatin Canyon demonstrates author Thomas McGuane's past master ability to put our language to work -- both for its own splendid sake and as a powerful tool for portraiture and storytelling. The book's 10 brilliant stories, three of which appeared originally in The New Yorker, are spiked with sentences that leap out in freshness. "The big picture always spoiled everything for everybody." "People in relationships nowadays seemed to retain their secrets like bank deposits." "We'd be allowed the frictionless lives of the meek." However, pungent as they might be, none of McGuane's terse observances stand alone or startle for the sake of startlement; all are imbedded in his crafty revelation of fascinating, original people doing things that might seem curious but are also curiously apt. A "Cowboy" with a prison sentence in his past trades backbreaking labor for an edgy peace on a Montana ranch only to have narrow-mindedness take it all away. In "Ice" a boy skates across a frozen lake in dangerous darkness and, in returning, leaves behind some of his troubled adolescence. In the book's title story, also it's most memorable, a narrow, traffic-infested, tourist-trapped canyon highway proves to be, both in fact and in metaphor, the bottleneck that an uneasy relationship cannot pass through. It's so rare to find a book in which the use of language is as enthralling as the matters examined. Gallatin Canyon is such a book. (Tom McElfresh) Grade: A