Elliot’s Reading Week of 5-9-21: McGuane, Graham Greene

 Elliot’s Reading Week of 5-9-21: McGuane, Graham Greene 

Just a brief note here on the excellent Thomas McGuane story in the current New Yorker, Balloons: McGuane has quietly in his long career has been building a record as one of the best American short story writers, in particular with his late-life focus on the changing Western landscape and culture, as California Hollywood/Technology/Entrepreneurial money has flooded into Montana, create a whole new social class - the Range Rover ranchers (my coinage) - that has displaced and in some sense corrupted the very culture that drew McGuane to this land in the first place: outdoors, jovially self-sufficient, hard-drinking, in other words the Hemingway of his Idaho years with a strange admixture of progressive independence and right-wing conspiratorial. The current NYer story is narrated by a Montana physician who gets word that a woman w/ whom he’d had an affair has recently died, leaving her long-time ex-husband in a state of alcoholic despair, with which the narrator has little empathy. The story is short and compact, as is typical of McGuane’s late style, and has a surprising, gut-punch ending, which I will not reveal: definitely worth your reading. 

I’m about half-way through (re)reading Graham Greene’s 1051 novel, The End of the Affair, and my overwhelming feeling about the book at this juncture is that the narrator, Maurice, is about the most despicable narrators in modern literature. He has a blatant affair with the wife of his friend Henry, makes no attempt at discretion, in fact takes relish in humiliating Henry, a true literary sad sack, and then wallows in self-pity when the woman breaks off with him and resumes her marriage. Moreover, as the novel begins, the narrator hates Henry (for no good reason as far as I can see other than jealousy perhaps) and goes so far as to hire detective to see if Henry’s wife (sorry, I forget her name) is seeing another man; good for her if she is! Improbably, the detective, a good comic figure, absconds with the woman’s diaries, which he provides to the narrator; reading them makes the narrator/Maurice seem like the sexiest and most intelligent man alive - a bit of self-aggrandizement there? All told, both she and him are immoral and unlikely and I don’t know why I liked this novel (and the film based on it) at one time. Maybe there will be some twists in the second half that can make this novel more palatable? 

And in the end … Graham Greene’s 1951 novel, The End of the Affair, doesn’t get any better, in fact, maybe worse. Seriously: The narrator of this story has a two-year relationship, primarily sexual, with the wife of one of his neighbors/cronies; when the woman dies of some kind of cold caught during a rainstorm, the narrator becomes friends and eventually roommate or tenant, of her widowed husband. There is little likelihood to any of this story ; the wife and the narrator are pretty nasty characters, and the widowed husband is just a schmo, a pathetic guy who was unable to satisfy his wife sexually or otherwise and for who we feel sorrow and pity but also contempt. The last 50 pp. or so focus on the narrator’s guilt - not for his despicable behavior toward the duped husband but because he thinks that the deceased wanted to be given Catholic rites at her death - and we go through 50 or so meandering pages about whether she was baptized a Christian at birth - Green even raises the possibility that the deceased is working miracles from beyond. Oh, please; would this novel ever have been published had not GG earned a loyal readership through many better novels and had there not been some kind of interest in what made GG convert to Catholicism some 30 years back. Today, who cares?