A Wooded Shore

McGuane (Crow Fair) rounds up another memorable group of misguided and doomed characters in this stellar collection. In “Balloons,” a doctor receives a jarring request from the man he cuckolded years ago. “Thataway” traces the fallout of an elderly woman’s death on her family, including her sister, who has never left their small prairie town, and her brother, an actor turned furniture store tycoon who refuses to return, even for the funeral. In “Take Half, Leave Half,” childhood best friends, one freewheeling and the other more circumspect, take a ranching job together in Oklahoma, only for their relationship to diverge in a fateful moment. The novella-length title story closes the collection with a potent decades-spanning chronicle of a family’s decline. McGuane’s ruminative protagonists are frequently preoccupied by mortality and the strange ways their lives have turned out. (One narrator, an EMT and safety inspector who makes the rounds at rest homes, thinks, “It does me good to see people hanging on despite basic biology so anxious to move them to the next world”; another admits, “I rarely saw myself so clearly and I can’t say I liked it.”) As always, McGuane stuffs his stories with offbeat plots, as when an insurance salesman’s life changes after he rescues a cat from a burning house, and darkly funny moments, such as a character dying from a dream. This provides further proof that McGuane is one of America’s greatest living writers. Agent: Jeffrey Posternak, Wylie Agency. (Oct.)