Thataway by Thomas McGuane, 2024
The magic trick:
Establishing two sisters early in the story with efficient and evocative details
What is this?
A Thomas McGuane dud?
I didn’t know there could be such a thing.
This story certainly isn’t bad. You might really like it.
I just didn’t care for it. I found it boring. I found the usually-amazing biographical details of McGuane stories to be overwhelming in their numbers and underwhelming in their sum. I found the usually-oddball characters to be fairly cookie-cutter. I found few if any surprises.
That said, there are a lot of interesting elements here. I especially enjoyed the family dynamic between the sisters, Mildred and Constance, who we meet at the start of the story. The detailed backstory gives us the feeling of knowing these people very well very quickly. I guess my disappointment stemmed mainly from being interested in seeing what might happen to these women and then being underwhelmed by where the story took them.
The knowing descriptions of them are excellent, though.
And that’s quite a trick on McGuane’s part.
The selection:
Age and shared genetics made the sisters look enough alike that, though each wore shapeless wash dresses, they chose markedly different patterns to go with their tennis shoes, which were similarly coded with Nike swooshes. Constance wore her hair short; Mildred’s was long enough to reach her waist when it wasn’t piled atop her head. The sisters hadn’t seen Cooper in almost a quarter century, but they hoped to before they died—an event they longed for, especially when they were very tired or when too many things had gone wrong, not necessarily earthshaking things but things with the house, the plumbing, or the car, which was good enough for buying groceries but not for going anywhere, leaving town, for instance, or getting away from each other.
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