To Skin a Cat (Thomas McGuane)

June 30, 2006

For the past few years I’ve spent a lot of time reading avant-garde writing. Post-avant poetry, the metafictionalists– I’ve been trying to get a handle on what’s happening “new and now.” Reading that work has elicited more than a few grimaces… though it makes me smile to recall Raymond Carver and the controversies of minimalism when that writing is positively fat and chunky compared to the often sterile experimentalists. I don’t know that I’ve had any success in my  mission, but the trek has made me hungry for stories I can sink my teeth into. This collection of stories was a good antidote!

One kind of good story is the kind that I find myself wishing I’d written even while knowing that I never really could have. In other words, fiction that gives me something I expect or understand or empathize with alongside something I never would have come up with or imagined (the metafictionalists and the experimentalists give me much of the latter and not enough of the former). McGuane writes realistic stories that are nonetheless undeniably other, a world that is convincingly his own but clearly part of mine. Great stuff.

Tags: reading log, short fiction, Thomas McGuane