The Cadence of Grass
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- £8.99
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- £8.99
Publisher Description
This is the story of the Whitelaws, a family whose values are as far flung as the territory they helped settle, and whose most recent generations have pioneered the landscape of dysfunction. The patriarch, Sunny Jim, exerts his perverse control even posthumously, by means of a last will and testament that binds the family fortune to a marriage that ought, by general consent, to be rent asunder.
The charms of this particular son-in-law, lately released from prison, are potent if short-lived; Evelyn Whitelaw, his estranged wife, is quite literally bedevilled by them. And as her mother and sister court this twisted inheritance, her own yearnings point toward a way of life once habitual on the western plains but now embodied only by Bill Champion, the family's ranch foreman and Evelyn's one true compass.
The Cadence of Grass is at once an elegy and a masterpiece of savage comedy from one of the most compelling novelists writing today.
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.
