The promise and the shorcomings of McGuane's first novel

By the end, I have to write off Thomas McGuane's debut novel, The Sporting Club (1968), as a highly promising first novel by a young (28) author who shows throughout a great writing style, a talent for smart and sharp dialog, a lot of arcane knowledge put to good use (lots of detail about fishing!), a talent for building up a dramatic scene and for building to a dynamic conclusion - yet, yet, can anyone really accept the end of this novel, in which the hunting/fishing camp in the Michigan woods turns orgiastic and bloodthirsty, in which the camp is essentially destroyed? The novel has a lot of promise but the young writer's skill and enthusiasm gets the best of his ability to tell a credible story; what starts as a naturalistic novel about a conflict of personalities, in particular between two old friends and lifetime rivals, becomes an exaggerated, sometimes ridiculous conflagration. In a way it's typical of the over-the-top narratives of its era - the end of civilization as we know it - and also typical of young writers learning what it means to design and construct a novel, a narrative, a plot. I would guess McGuane looks back on this novel w/ some pride and with much bemusement - because it was in fact predictive of a fine young writer at the start of his career. McGuane has gone on to an incredibly successful career - somewhat underappreciated and out of the mainstream of American letters, in part by his choosing to avoid the academy and to settle in Montana. And of course has writing style has matured and settled over the years; it's hard to walk back from his current stories about life in the newly prosperous Northwest to the Dionsysian rambunctious happenings of Sporting Club, but in retrospect we can see that the talent was there and that McGuane developed that talent, even if in unpredictable ways.