I imagine a literary agent. A Hollywood-stock character in his late sixties with big, plastic-framed glasses, sitting in a crummy office in Manhattan or Burbank and barking into the telephone: “Tommy, I love you like a brother but the critics are bustin' my balls. They want a story. If I'm gonna sell you to the Prozac crowd then for Chrissake you gotta gimme some plot!” And then, flustered: “Hang on a minute Tommy, I got Danielle Steel on the other line.”When it came out in 1989, at least one professional reviewer applauded Keep the Change as evidence of a 'new maturity' in McGuane. The man had calmed down. He'd discovered the virtues of plot and continuity. He'd attended the workshops on Building Believable Characters.And he'd given us a genuine hero, Joe Starling. Clearly, McGuane had decided to play by the rules. Starling seems a can-do kind of a guy. He puts his back into a few things. He repairs fences. He scrapes together some cash and assembles a motley herd of cattle. We almost warm to Joe Starling.Almost. Except that:. . . Joe got out of school, moved to New York, and became a successful painter. . . . The next thing he knew, he couldn't paint. It didn't seem all that subtle psychologically; and he had a good grasp of it. He had always painted from memory, and for some reason he couldn't seem to remember much of late.And then:He thought the pain of his love for Astrid would be more than he could stand.Oh dear. The complex artistic type, or an ineffectual crybaby who manages just enough gumption to play a passable game of checkers with his family's land interests? I found myself not caring much one way or the other, but gravitating maybe slightly towards the latter.Fortunately, there is also Ivan Slater, a typically splendid McGuane entrepreneur: He wore a blousy Cuban shirt and rolled his pants up in some ghastly sartorial reference to peasantry; instead of appropriate sandals or huaraches, he wore the lace-up black street shoes of his more accustomed venues in New York. A sunny optimist (as any entrepreneur must be), but a practical one, Ivan's advice on serial dating is rock-solid:. . . the more indistinguishable they get, the more its like having some show dog in your pants that can't live on ordinary kibble.Now we're talking. Ivan's evening out with Starling in Miami and their dinner at the Yale Club are, without a doubt, some of the book's best moments. The new maturity might not be quite as dire as it sounds.Starling has two love interests. One is Ellen, a general-purpose small-town girl with vocabulary and IQ that can be stretched or shrunk to suit the scene in question - the sort of character who's as handy and useful to the writer as poly-filler is to the guy who installs plaster-board.The other is Astrid. Now here's a woman. My goodness am I sweet on her (and yeah, I think I could probably bear the pain). It's embarrassing, really - steady on, dude, she's a made-up person in a book.The plot is, to be sure, a tidy and satisfying one. There may even be a sort of moral to the story. I like that.I also appreciate McGuane's obvious regard for prairie or grazing grasses. For whatever reason, I too have an interest in meadow grasses and weeds, and it's an enthusiasm that rarely finds its way into modern fiction.Overall, I'd put the book at the lower end of the scale for McGuane. But that said, I've never regretted reading anything he's written.
What do You think about Keep The Change (1989)?
Interesting enough for me to read once all the way through, though I did contemplate not finishing a few times, but not one I'll need to read again. I'm always looking for books like A River Runs Through It that really portray the essence of the Rocky Mountain area. But this book just didn't do that for me. One exchange came close, but still not quite there:"But this country, it's the big romance in your life, isn't it?""For what it's worth.""The mountains?""I don't particularly like the mountains," said Joe."You like all that other stuff. The stuff that doesn't look like anything. The prairie.""Yep"It's not the part about the mountains here (I personally adore the western mountains), but the description of the prairie that tugs at me.Joe doesn't know what he wants to be when he grows up. Starts as an artist, even though it causes a rift with his father, who wants him to go into business and take over their Montana ranch. He falls half-heartedly in love with the neighbor cowgirl, but leaves for the East coast after a summer working the ranch, which is now in the hands of his father's sister and brother. Lureen and Smitty are ostensibly holding the ranch for Joe, but Smitty keeps squirreling away the lease money.Joe ends up in Florida, no longer painting, but now drawing illustrations for the manuals for his friend Ivan's ever crazier inventions. As the lease money from the ranch stops coming in, and Ivan's inventions get more and more impractical, Joe steals his girlfriend's car and returns to MT to work on the ranch. Astrid follows him, and they play a half-hearted game of playing house, while Joe raises a mishmash herd of yearlings to pay for the ranch. Even though Lureen signs over the deed to Joe, Smitty still ends up with the money, and Joe faces losing the ranch.Ellen, the neighboring cowgirl, has married Joe's childhood friend Billy. Ellen's father has always coveted Joe's ranch because it will complete his property's perfect square; he's chafed at having a chunk bitten out of it for longer than Joe's been alive. When Astrid leaves, no longer able to handle MT, and Joe is facing losing the ranch, he finally signs the deed over to Ellen and Billy as one final "screw you" to Ellen's father.
—Danielle
