Word: likely
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...months has come to view sleep as a hobby that he once had time for. "In soft, soothing tones that the Metternich school of diplomacy would doubtless endorse, they first apologize profusely for waking you and then tell you that the editors need to know, generally instantly, something like the GNP of each Warsaw Pact country. The secret, which they have mastered, is to be smooth and nonchalant...
...setting out from Florida to reclaim the Montana ranch left to him by his father. As the plot progresses to its ironic denouement, Joe courts his teenage sweetheart, rekindles a love affair with the land and comes to terms with some family ghosts -- both dead and alive. Like most McGuane protagonists, Starling is at a gallop between his past and future, an existential cowboy with good intentions and bad habits, determined to take his spiritual malaise by the horns and shake some meaning out of it. He is, in other words, a lot like Thomas McGuane...
...Loyal readers will find themselves on familiar terrain -- the bone-dry wit, terse dialogue, lyrical descriptions of nature and hovering suggestion of violence are pure McGuane. But the measured tone and relatively upbeat ending of the book are a far cry from the pyrotechnical flash of his earlier works like The Bushwacked Piano or Ninety-Two in the Shade. Not all McGuane fans have stayed for the ride. "There are readers who abandoned me over the feeling that my writing has become relatively lusterless," he observes. "But your literary style is kind of like your face...
...only a matter of time before McGuane looked through the bottom of a shot glass and glimpsed his own mortality. Observes longtime friend and fellow novelist Jim Harrison (Legends of the Fall): "Like a lot of writers, we started out reading Rimbaud and Dostoyevsky, and you think that in order to write you also have to be partly crazy. And later on it occurs to us that we're going to die unless we behave." Realizing that "my streak of self- destructiveness had to end," McGuane quit drinking and poured himself into writing. Two novels -- Nobody's Angel...
...Jekyll-and-Hyde-like transformation from well-mannered writer to party animal and back again has led some to wonder which is the real McGuane. Both and neither, answers McGuane, who is irked by the fact that his wild and crazy days have taken on "a kind of monster reality" in the press. "During that period I was supposed to be living in the street, I also wrote ten movies, a novel and about 25 pieces of journalism," he says with annoyance. "Even in the flamboyant period of the '70s, I would say 85% of my waking time was spent...