Balloons by Thomas McGuane, 2021
The magic trick:
Revealing the narrator’s character through the subtle qualities revealed by the way he tells his story
If you read a story that’s 10 years old in an anthology, it’s a pretty safe bet it will be good. It’s already stood a certain test of time.
A story from 50 years ago still in print? You can rightly expect a classic.
But then there’s the here and now. Reading a story the week it comes out in the New Yorker, you probably should assume it won’t be that good. I mean, obviously it made it into the New Yorker; that’s a badge of quality in itself, of course. But I guess I’m just saying if you’ve been reading from the decades-old canon, trying out an untested newbie is a risk.
So it’s exciting when you stumble upon a brand new story (as this one was in May 2021 when I read it) and find one that feels like something that’s going to be anthologized for the rest of the century. It’s that good.
McGuane is in total control here. Not a single beat misses the mark. It’s as if he knows exactly what you will think and feel with every sentence.
His narrator presents himself as the hero of the piece – in direct contrast to his former lover’s husband. But this invites the reader to analyze his character between the lines. We start to look at not only what he tells us but what those things reveal about him – his insecurities, guilt, and pain. The combination of the told and the revealed become a fascinating portrait.
And that’s quite a trick on McGuane’s part.
The selection:
Ten years before Joan Krebs left her husband, Roger, and moved back to Cincinnati, I spotted the two of them dining alone by the bricked-up fireplace in the Old Eagle Grill. She was a devoted daughter, her father a sportsman with well-bred dogs, who arrived once a year to peer at Roger and inspect the marriage. Roger always saluted his father-in-law’s departure with the words “Good riddance.” In those days, Joan stirred up our town with her air of dangerous glamour and the sense that her marriage to Roger couldn’t possibly last. There was nothing wrong with Roger, but talking to him was laborious. As the founder of the once famous Nomad Agency, he sold high-end recreational properties to members of his far-flung society, and he had taken on the language of his clients. After he described a drought-stricken, abandoned part of the state as a “tightly held neighborhood,” he came to be known as Tightly Held Krebs, or T.H. In the areas of Montana that were subject to his creative hyperbole, people bought god-awful properties, believing that they were an acquired taste. Renowned for his many closings, Roger was on the road a lot; this worked perfectly for Joan and me.
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