On Thomas McGuane

The Riddle

Many of the best stories are a kind of riddle, and Thomas McGuane takes on an essential one in this piece. “We don’t remember everything, but I’d love to know who’s in charge of what we forget,” the narrator muses. Several events that happened during the course of one evening and morning have haunted him for years, and this story is an effort to make sense of them.

I was hooked from the fourth line, when the narrator, an architect, refers to a small-scale model he created of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater: “Most of my clients thought it was my design.” Very funny. This is a guy who reflects on his own “remote house and its unconquered air of vacancy,” someone who suspects that he’s not inhabiting his authentic life. Given the line above, which of us is? Can any of us separate what is authentic in our workaday life from a greater, more mysterious reality?

The narrator is nagged by the vision of an old cowboy’s encounter, late at night on Main Street, with a young boy. “I don’t know if I can put my finger on it after all this time, but the excitement or joy, or whatever it was that these two experienced when they saw each other, has never left me.” Perhaps the cowboy or young man has witnessed the robbery of Sinclair Station, something so thrilling it broke through their ordinary, less real existence. The narrator has none of that enchantment in his own life; his work is copying the creation of others.

But just after this he comes upon a scene similarly mythic: a man and woman standing beside an upturned car. “ ‘Just play along,’ [the man says.] His gaze was very direct. ‘I think you can do that.’ ” The man sees right through the narrator, who seems to have been “playing along” his entire life. By only feigning help, he is essentially a non-savior; a failed-Christ, he picks the thistles out of his palm. Though the narrator can’t put his finger on the meaning of things, the “crazy” woman “touched a finger to a button on [his] shirt,”—fingering him as a witness? An accomplice? That’s the sheriff’s verdict the next day when he says, “They… got some help from you.” Rather than report that the two had stolen his car, the narrator “tend[s] to other matters” with an ER doctor—someone who actually saves lives for a living. When she picks him up on the side of the road, she says, “You’re lucky to be alive!” But neither the realization nor the ensuing one-night stand shakes him out of his passivity.

To the sheriff, the narrator is complicit in the robber’s death: “[I]t never needed to come to this. Maybe you should think about that. There wasn’t nothing in the world wrong with that young woman. [His faulty grammar states that, in fact, there was something in the world wrong with her.] You ever see a pretty gal in a morgue? I don’t recommend it.” But the narrator hasn’t considered that he’s complicit in his own life, much less the woman’s death. See how he says that the “models… pretty well ate his career.” An impossible thing!

And then there’s the sheriff’s answer to the narrator’s question about the cowboy’s name: “If he has a name, I wouldn’t know it.” Such an odd response. It’s our final clue that the cowboy is out of some mythic reality and not an individualized character. Besides, the narrator already knows the cowboy’s name. He heard the boy call him Jack, but that doesn’t explain to the narrator who or what he is.

The narrator doesn’t pause for long over this conundrum. With the last line, he has moved on—or, in a sense, returned—to the problem of how to make up for pieces lost in his stolen car so that he can create his next model of someone else’s work. The events of the night vex him more than they enlighten—like most of our dreams.

Joyce Carol Oates has said that the short story is a “dream verbalized,” and “The Riddle” measures up exquisitely.

Read “The Riddle” in The New Yorker here.

Weight Watchers

The narrator of this story is also in the home design business, a builder. His concerns, however, are with helping realize the hopes and dreams of others, however distorted they may be. With the first sentences, his father’s obesity appears to be the subject of the story—his mother has just thrown him out of the house for his weight. But that focus quickly expands to include all the father’s appetites, both for sex (with lap dances) and for violence (with war). As the story moves forward we realize that this narrator indulges many people’s desires, while denying his own.

Often this involves helping people change the landscape around them. There’s the plastic surgeon, a man whose profession is to perfect the physical flaws people can’t live with; he would rather watch something out of Hollywood on his home movie screen than look onto his gorgeous view of the cordillera. The narrator’s construction crew makes a pond out of a marshy spot, drops a bridge across a creek, and blocks out the aforementioned mountain view because “sometimes it rains.”

What seems to bring the narrator pleasure about his job site is the violence of it. The scream of the saw, the noise of the nail gun, the thermoses precariously on a ledge—the kind of danger experienced in his childhood home. “She actually bit me!” his father rants about his mother. Neither parent accepts the other. We learn that the mother was a Southerner with independent means, but the father has insisted on keeping her “in sight of [Rust Belt] smokestacks all her life.” Each parent has exchanged the physical sight of the other with countless lovers.

In the first paragraph the narrator says he answers the calls of obesity-cure solicitations—he even engages with the callers!—but in the last paragraph he says that he uses the phone only for outbound calls. So he’s not quite honest with the reader or himself. What about that girlfriend he went out West with? She gets one mention in the story. He’s cut himself off but he’s still carrying around the weight of his parents. Being involved in a meaningful, loving relationship would mean losing that weight.

It would also mean accepting the inevitable flaws of another person, like Dee and Helen have. The only other couple mentioned in the story, they don’t try to change their view, which might be the least desirable of anyone’s. Yet they are respectively “happy,” and “enchanted” with and by their prospects. Dee even prepares the land himself, so this isn’t a landscape that the narrator has to alter. “Dee had spent forty years on a fencing crew and constantly massaged his knotty, damaged hands. Helen cooked at the high school, where generations of students had ridiculed her food.” Not only do you get their whole lives in these descriptions, you know that their desire for this “honeymoon house,” decades into their marriage, is a reward for years of sweet acceptance.

But the narrator tells us, “I build houses for other people, and it works for me.” He has certainly supplied a safe haven for his parents. He’s as happy to play along that he prefers them together as he is to slim down his father so his mother will take him back. The narrator is the one starving his own emotional needs, giving up his desire to love and be loved. It’s all in a day’s—this adult child’s—work.

Read “Weight Watchers” in The New Yorker here.