The Cadence of Grass

Alfred A. Knopf, 2002. First edition. Hardcover. Like New/Fine. 6x1x8. In his first novel since his best-selling Nothing but Blue Skies, and thirty-three years after The Sporting Club established his reputation, Thomas McGuane’s trademark combination of high wit, low behavior, and hard-won wisdom has never been on sharper—or, ultimately, more moving—display. This is the story of the Whitelaws, a family whose values are as far-flung as the territory they helped settle, and whose most recent generations have pioneered the landscape of dysfunction.The patriarch, Sunny Jim, exerts his perverse control even posthumously, by means of a last will and testament that binds the family fortune (a bottling franchise) to a marriage that ought, by general assent, to be rent asunder. The charms of this particular son-in-law, lately released from prison, are potent if short-lived; Evelyn Whitelaw, his estranged wife, is quite literally bedeviled by them. And as her mother and sister court this twisted inheritance, her own yearnings point toward a way of life once habitual on these western plains but now embodied only by Bill Champion, the family’s ranch foreman and Evelyn’s one true compass.A novel charged with the relentless and often contradictory claims of blood, money, history, and love, The Cadence of Grass is at once a masterpiece of savage comedy and an elegy for what has been lost. Long one of our most compelling novelists, Thomas McGuane has written the most ambitious book of his singularly distinguished career.