People Acting Up: 'Gallatin Canyon'

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ROBERT SIEGEL, host:

Thomas McGuane has written nearly a dozen works of fiction. Most of them are set either in Key West or under the big sky of Montana. In his latest collection of stories, Gallatin Canyon, it's mostly Montana that serves as the backdrop for tales about how people behave and misbehave. Alan Cheuse has a review.

ALAN CHEUSE: The title story of this new collection of short fiction gives us a businessman and his girlfriend driving through a dicey northern Rockies Mountain pass. He's trying to work out a deal involving the sale of a car lot and edges into an attempt to rework his life.

Before their little jaunt is over, the pure air of Big Sky Country, as least for the narrator, gives off a whiff of irrefutable change and probably not change for the better.

The other Montana stories reveal characters in equally definitive dilemmas. In Vicious Circle, John Briggs, a Montana summer resident, gets caught in the thrall of an attractive, young, hard drinking female local. Briggs also appears in the story Old Friends. In this one, he's paid a surprise visit by a college pal who's made some big mistake in business practices and who's now looking to take serious advantage of Briggs.

A couple of stories stray from the Montana setting. In The Refugee, a drunken yachtsman named Errol Healy tacks for oblivion into a Gulfstream Gale similar to the one in which his best friend, crewing for him many years before, fell overboard and drowned. The Refugee is a wonderful moral adventure story with a surprising, if not surprise, ending that would've made Conrad flinch.

SIEGEL: The book is Gallatin Canyon by Thomas McGuane. Our reviewer, Alan Cheuse, teaches writing at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia.

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