Thomas McGuane

His first and, until Driving On the Rim (2010), only novel written in the first person, it is the story of a flash-in-the-pan rock star named Chet Pomeroy who suffers delusion after delusion and can only imagine salvation in the character of Catherine, a literary embodiment of McGuane’s feelings toward his third wife, Laurie Buffett, sister of Jimmy Buffett, one of McGuane’s Key West comrades. The novel was mercilessly panned by critics as self-absorbed and a testament to wasted literary talent – notwithstanding McGuane’s protests that he considered it his best novel and that he was intentionally creating a lugubrious character who was not entitled, in the common view, to his feelings of loss and depression.

An ongoing struggle has ensued between McGuane and his reviewers concerning their expectations for his fiction, and their sense of how much McGuane-the-celebrity was intruding upon his work. The upheaval of the period concluded with the deaths of McGuane’s father, mother, and sister in the span of 30 months, and by McGuane’s admission that he felt no desire to author a comic novel like any of his first three works. Read Less