Hemingway v McGruane in the debut novel, The Sporting Club

Just to give a brief sense of how Thomas McGuane's debut novel, The Sporting Club, may seem at first to be Hemingwayesque - how could a novel about men in a private rod & gun club, with many beautifully written passages describing fly fishing and hunting, set in Michigan no less! not be compared with Hemingway?; what a long shadow for a young writer to try to come out from under - but is in fact the kind of narrative Hemingway never wrote and never would have. Though the setting affords McGuane ample opportunity to display not only his writing skills but also his arcane knowledge about fishing and hunting, the plot of the novel is a conventional threesome romance (closer, come to think of it, to FS Fitzgerald than to EH): two men with houses at the camp, Quinn (the protagonist) and Stanton (the antagonist) are both descendants of long-time club members, both successful in the Detroit business world, childhood friendly rivals, still as 30-something adults working out the rivalry. Quinn is apparently a bachelor; Stanton has brought a woman, Janey, w/ him to the camp - she seems at the halfway point to be the only woman in the camp - whom members suppose to be his new wife (he confesses to Quinn that they have not married). Stanton is an incredible egotist, cannot stand not being the best at everything he does, including the usually noncompetitive outdoor sports. He feels shown up by the manager of the club, Olson, a young man who grew up in the vicinity, from an impoverished family (unlike all the club members), an extraordinary skilled at hunting and fishing and knowledgeable about local terrain. Stanton can't stand being one-upped by anyone, so he begins a campaign to fire Olson - and at the halfway point succeeds and Olson is replaced by a brusque, weird, suspicious guy, Olson's personal pick as his successor. This cannot work out. All the while, all readers will be alerted by the stupid gunplay that Stanton entices Quinn to partake of - sure to lead to some kind of tragic climax, but involving whom? In Hemingway, a gun is a gun; in McGuane, it's an omen,