An autumn snow has glazed the Crazy Mountains and left a confectionary dusting on the hills and gullies of Montana's West Boulder valley. Atop his horse, Thomas McGuane is silent for a moment as he surveys the Turkish carpet of prairie juniper, sage, buckbrush and wheatgrass that blankets his 3,700- acre ranch in Big Sky country. "It's funny," he says at last, "but you never know where lightning will strike. You're sort of a moving target for fortune, and you never know when it will befall you."
Not that McGuane is complaining. A fit 50, he has weathered the storms of literary celebrity, Hollywood, alcoholism, two failed marriages and at least one critical scalping, only to retain his stature as one of the most original American writers on either side of the Mississippi. This fall his seventh novel, Keep the Change, was published, ending a four-year hiatus from long fiction. The New York Times proclaimed it the "best book he has written to date." Almost as sweet is the news that Keep the Change is already the best- selling book of his career. No wonder that McGuane's Raw Deal Ranch has been rechristened Gladstone.
Keep the Change chronicles the cross-country escapades of Joe Starling, a blocked painter who endeavors to "put his old life to an end" by stealing his girlfriend's car and setting out from Florida to reclaim the Montana ranch left to him by his father. As the plot progresses to its ironic denouement, Joe courts his teenage sweetheart, rekindles a love affair with the land and comes to terms with some family ghosts -- both dead and alive. Like most McGuane protagonists, Starling is at a gallop between his past and future, an existential cowboy with good intentions and bad habits, determined to take his spiritual malaise by the horns and shake some meaning out of it. He is, in other words, a lot like Thomas McGuane.
Both a departure and a summing up, Keep the Change is described by McGuane as a "happy superimposition of results on intentions." Loyal readers will find themselves on familiar terrain -- the bone-dry wit, terse dialogue, lyrical descriptions of nature and hovering suggestion of violence are pure McGuane. But the measured tone and relatively upbeat ending of the book are a far cry from the pyrotechnical flash of his earlier works like The Bushwacked Piano or Ninety-Two in the Shade. Not all McGuane fans have stayed for the ride. "There are readers who abandoned me over the feeling that my writing has become relatively lusterless," he observes. "But your literary style is kind of like your face -- you can't do much to change it. I just hope that you can look at a shelf of my books and say, 'This is a 40-year struggle to understand the human race.' "