Thomas McGuane's 'A Wooded Shore' May Be the Vital Literature of the Trump Era

Thomas McGuane's latest story collection, A Wooded Shore, is quite possibly the most vital literature of the Trump era — and, despite his accolades, its author remains underrated and underread.

That is the argument advanced by a recent essay assessing how literary fiction has responded to a decade of political chaos. The piece surveys the field: readers flocked to journalistic and historical explainers during Trump's first term, then to classics during the pandemic, then to escapist genre fare and comfort reads in the second term. Novelists have answered the moment in three modes — the Rabelaisian excess of Tony Tulathimutte's Rejection and Mark Doten's Trump Sky Alpha; acidic, class-conscious portraits of the underemployed by Andrew Martin and Halle Butler; and allegory, via history (Zadie Smith's The Fraud) and the supernatural (George Saunders's Vigil).

All of it, the essay notes, operates within the political sphere of its reception: "By the left, of the left, for the left." McGuane, who lives on a ranch in Big Sky Country — "out in the boonies, two miles from a town of six," as he told The New Yorker — writes from red-state geography, capturing its denizens with a compassion his subjects cannot reciprocate and a voice that counters MAGA hyperbole with plainspoken wryness.

Now in his eighties, McGuane has produced novels, stories, and nonfiction — mostly about horses and fishing — for half a century. His third novel, Ninety-Two in the Shade, was a National Book Award finalist. His 1970s Hollywood dalliances included screenplays and two famous marriages: his second wife was Superman actress Margot Kidder, his first later married Peter Fonda, and his third is the sister of the late Jimmy Buffett.

He turned to short fiction relatively late, and the New York Times called him "a master of the short story" upon publication of the career-spanning Cloudbursts. McGuane has described the form as "like trying to start a fire in the rain." An Atlantic profile last year called him "the last of his kind."

A Wooded Shore — much of which first appeared in The New Yorker and The Paris Review — names the sitting president exactly once, in the opening line of the title novella: widower Fred Latham lives aboard "a Trumpy yacht at the Capital Yacht Club on the Potomac." Trump, the essay observes, "doesn't earn his own noun" in the sentence; he is "more atmosphere than object. The toxic airborne event has become permanently bad weather."

The collection's strengths lie in its shorter pieces. "Wide Spot" follows a middling Montana politician on a get-out-the-vote tour who seeks out Micah Clardy, the former singer in his old rock band, in a moribund one-tavern town. Micah laughs in his face and curses him as "the perfect politician." The narrator closes with deluded affirmation: "You never know what's next, and that is why I can say with all honesty that I am not a depressed person. Unlike Mr. Fixit, I have a future and I don't intend to fade."

"Thataway," the essay argues, "should be anthologized for decades to come." It follows sisters Mildred and Constance Parrott in a "windblown prairie town"; Mildred dies on page two, and her brother Cooper — a minor Westerns actor turned furniture-store magnate — returns under pressure from his documentary-making daughter Bonny. When Bonny asks whether he was ever homeless, Cooper answers, "Not always," and she thinks, "Something about the way he said it told her it would be very strong during editing." The story ends with Constance arriving on Cooper's Palm Springs doorstep: "I have arrived! Is it a problem?"

The essay's core claim is formal: MAGA-era intractability suits the short story precisely. "The MAGA faithful take pride in their intractability," and McGuane's characters — white men who cling to their self-conception at the expense of self-awareness — confront moments of reckoning "some comic, others karmic, often both" where self-belief collides with a buckling status quo. Novels, by contrast, must develop; "nobody wants 250 pages of stasis." McGuane told The Believer, "Life consists of escape," and his characters mostly fail to — which, the essay concludes, extends both the reader's reach and grasp. What else is a literature for?