New Yorker
McGuane's ninth novel begins as a soap opera, with the members of a monumentally dysfunctional family wrestling over their shares of the deceased patriarch's estate. Representatives of an American West gone to seed, the Whitelaw daughters and their husbands drink too much, sleep around, and try to gouge each other out of their inheritances. But if the Whitelaws are what the West is, Bill Champion -- the family's old ranch hand -- is what it might have been, and as the novel shifts its attention to Champion, it becomes an evocation of a lost world. The real engine of the book is not plot, though, but language: McGuane's sentences are like no one else's, crisp and spare, yet somehow baroque, and he perpetually balances the picaresque against the sublime. "It was one thing to be observant," the ne'er-do-well Paul Crusoe thinks, "and quite another to be absolutely awake."
Publishers Weekly
McGuane has gone from Florida to Montana novelist, but his most famous novels still date from the beginning of his career. His latest has the hip feel of Panama, without the drugs and hallucinations. Sunny Jim Whitelaw is dead, but he continues to cast a shadow over his family's life. His will requires that his daughter Evelyn patch up her relationship with her no-good husband, Paul"if she doesn't, the ownership and profits of Sunny Jim's Montana bottling plant will be lost. Though Evelyn's sister, Natalie, has had quality sex with Paul, she urges her sister to stay married for the good of the family; she herself is itching to divorce her dull husband Stuart. Handsome, treacherous Paul, ( infernal, as his parole officer/lover thinks of him) is barely a year out of prison when Sunny Jim dies and the Whitelaw family and all its wealth seems about to wind up in his lap. The prospect of this is bad enough, but Evelyn and Natalie also have to deal with the revelation that Bill Champion, Sunny Jim's old rancher/partner, means more to their mother, Alice, than they ever suspected. As a friend of Natalie's puts it, the times had turned against good-hearted party girls. The times have changed for small Montana ranchers like Bill Champion, too, whose involvement in one of Paul's deals is, predictably, a recipe for disaster. McGuane tells this story of the fall, or at least slump, of the house of Whitelaw in his trademark style, a balladic ramble through the consciousnesses of Evelyn, Natalie, Stuart and Paul. On the surface, McGuane's prose is all moral unflappability, but underneath there's clearly a nostalgia for a less self-indulgent culture, one in which people kept to their (preferably stoic) codes. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.
Library Journal
The West is still wild in McGaune's latest novel (after Nothing but Blue Skies). The story begins with the passing of Sunny Jim Whitelaw and the discovery that he left control of the family bottling franchise to his son-in-law, Paul Crusoe. However, Sunny Jim's daughter, Evelyn, is in the middle of divorcing Paul, an ex-con and former drifter. So that the business can be sold and everyone can get on with life in and around Bozeman, MT, Evelyn's immediate family members including sister Natalie, a shoplifter and substance abuser; Natalie's blandly good-natured husband, Stuart; and mother Alice pressure her to reconcile. Paul is indifferent to such concepts as morality and decency, and it seems only a matter of time before he falls. The question is, whom is he going to drag down with him? Evelyn, his likely victim, finds refuge from marital and family discord in the frontier lifestyle at the ranch of old-time family friend Bill Champion. Peopled with quirky, humorous, and sometimes downright dangerous characters, this novel is absorbing, meaningful, and brilliantly written. Recommended for all libraries. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 2/15/02.] Jim Coan, SUNY Coll. at Oneonta Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
Novelist and essay-writer McGuane (Nothing But Blue Skies; The Longest Silence) assembles a large cast for a small but satisfying story about crazies, their keepers, and their victims in his beloved and beguiling Montana. Through his nastily manipulative last will and testament, the late Sunny Jim Whitelaw continues to torment the family he drove round the bend. In order to cash out of the pop-bottling business Jim's son-in-law Paul Crusoe is speedily running into the ground, Whitelaw's will requires his hard-riding daughter Evelyn to end her separation from the sexy but wildly unsteady Paul. Failing that reconciliation, the heirs will all be required to live off the shrinking soda-pop profits that Paul seems hell-bent on eliminating altogether. There is considerable pressure on Evelyn from sister Natalie, who needs plenty of cash if she is to shuck her nerdy but managerially competent husband Stuart, and from Jim's widow Alice, who wants to go on an Alaskan cruise and then live a nice life now that her tomcatting husband is safely buried. But Evelyn is already leading a nice life, thank you. Regardless of her marriage, the will cuts her into her father's ranch where she takes lessons in horsemanship, cattle management, and rustic stoicism from manager and WWII sailor Bill Champion. And, no matter how good in bed Paul may be, Evelyn sees no point in taking back a man who is carrying on with his probate officer. Paul's probation follows a term in the state pen awarded for manslaughter when a drunk Sunny Jim ran into a motorcyclist and Paul politely took the rap, even though his father-in-law had stolen his kidney. These awfully stretched story lines wander perilouslyclose to Florida baroque, but McGuane always knows when to back off and bring in the horses, snow, scenery, and brief moments of sanity to show the real and deeply appealing selves of Evelyn and her manly rancher role model Bill and all that excellent Big Sky country. Exhilarating: like a good run in bad weather.
