Tom McGuane Traverses Family Fault Line is Crow Fair

At the conclusion of his title story “Crow Fair,” Tom McGuane’s narrator understands he’s “getting to be…an old timer.” McGuane, Michigan born and raised, is himself an old timer, but his new collection of short stories illustrates he still commands the form. Like his running buddy Jim Harrison, McGuane now calls Montana home, so most of these stories are set in Big Sky Country, where his characters, old timers and some younger, lean into the troubles that accompany a range of ailments, real and imagined, but always family-themed. These stories hover over fault lines. In “Weight Watchers,” the narrator’s father moves in because, “My mother had thrown him out again, this time for his weight.” His father, it seems, is “insufficiently committed to his weight-loss journey.” Over the next week, the two men, father—at more than 250 pounds, and son--a small town contractor who lives alone--shadow box through memories of earlier times. “My father believed that anything done for pleasure was escapism,” our narrator explains, illustrating the old man’s attitudes. In a few short pages melancholy memories of how the narrator, who cannot “imagine letting anyone new stay in (his) house for more than a night,” navigates his largely unremarkable Midwestern upbringing. In “Hubcaps,” McGuane heads back to Michigan to find Owen, whose parents, by midafternoon, “were usually having their first cocktails.” The boy escapes to the neighbors and the “baseball diamond that the three Kershaw boys and their father had built in the pasture across from their house.” “Happy with his George Kell spot at third base,” Owen tries to avoid the unraveling of his parents’ marriage by accompanying Mr. Kershaw on arrowhead scavenging treks. When more and more of his life delaminates, however, Owen tries to patch it together by adding to his hubcap collection, even wandering “the darkened parking lot” to do so, replacing the cohesion of a predictable family structure with the lonely pursuit of simple law breaking. In the title story, Earl, a loan officer, and his brother Kurt, an orthodontist, move their mother to a rest home. Though their father “was a mouse” who “looked like a corkscrew” the last few years of his life, their mother “was a queen.” Now in the throes of dementia, however, she recollects her old lover “Wowser,”as the middle-aged brothers try to reconstruct their youth to find some sense in her senseless ranting. Ultimately, Earl invents “a gentler interpretation of (their) mother and the choices she made.” In “Crow Fair,” McGuane, author of more than a dozen other books, returns to familiar ground, whether the Midwest or the Big Sky, to examine the fault lines, real or imagined, of family.