(4 of 5)
During dinner, McGuane sips nonalcoholic beer and talks about an upcoming cutting-horse competition in Billings. Cutting, a highly stylized ritual in which a horse and rider "work" a cow in much the same way a defensive guard tries to block a basketball, is a dear topic for the McGuanes. They also happen to be formidably good at it. Laurie is Montana's defending cutting- horse champion, Tom was No. 1 the year before, and the two are the leading contenders for the 1989 trophy. "We take turns," Laurie laughs.
McGuane is alert to revealing parallels between the art of cutting cattle and the craft of writing novels. "You cannot work cattle by force," he explains. "A cutting horse separates a cow from the herd through a kind of choreographic countermovement. It's very much like fiction: you can't sit down and say, 'Goddammit, I'm going to blast out these sentences and send them to the publisher' -- this kind of John Wayneism of literature. You just can't." He finds the notion of a so-called Rocky Mountain school of literature equally specious. Still, he admits that "there is a residual frontier feeling of open possibilities that seems to be a part of the voice of living here."
At the same time, McGuane rejects the charge that he has turned his back on reality by retreating to "a kind of Early American theme park." To McGuane, both urban blight and rural isolation are symptoms of a deeper problem. "I do think that there's a kind of national illness, and I think that every American is touched by it," he says. "It's a by-product of this 20-year wave of narcissism and self-help movements and stuff where people have lost the ability to refer to things larger than themselves, and their reward is solitude. It penetrates Montana as thoroughly as it penetrates Manhattan."
Which perhaps explains his current fascination with the harmony found in the pedestrian rhythms of ordinary life. "The kind of place that really gives me a thrill now is a place like Chicago or Toledo or Buffalo, where you notice people rolling out and going to work in the morning," says McGuane. "After 50 years of living, it occurs to me that the most significant thing that people do is go to work, whether it is to go to work on their novel or the assembly plant or fixing somebody's teeth."
The advent of a Rocky Mountain frost provides the perfect impetus for McGuane's own literary labors. In fact, McGuane is already itching to start a new novel, which he says will cover a "larger piece of territory, a larger slice of humanity and include some topics I've never written about before, like politics."