Hurtin' Cowboy

By Richard Stengel

NOBODY'S ANGEL by Thomas McGuane

Random House; 227pages; $14.50

The word around the corral is that with his new novel, Nobody's Angel, Thomas McGuane rode into town, swung open the doors of the saloon and single-handed transformed the saddleworn cliches of Western fiction. The irony is that McGuane's fifth novel is his first set in the West. The Sporting Club, his debut, occurs up in Michigan, Hemingway country, while his best novel, Ninety-Two in the Shade, takes place in Key West (again Hemingway turf), where McGuane lived and worked. Although McGuane, 42, moved to Livingston, Mont., in 1968, he has not mined the region until now. His Montana has none of the romantic magic of Zane Grey's glowing hills. In Nobody's Angel the sky is harsh, the mountains formidable, the rivers icebound. The town of Deadrock (read Livingston) is the focal point of this austere landscape. Here station wagons are parked where horses once were loosely tied.

The title role is taken by Patrick Fitzpatrick, no ordinary ranch hand. Sure, he breaks broncs and gets violently drunk. But he also reads Thucydides, has a philologist's loathing for the bad grammar of his colleagues, and shops for mushrooms like Paul Bocuse. He values the purity and simplicity of Western life but rarely enjoys it. Patrick is too busy feeling superior to cowboys, real and rhinestone. Haunted by what he calls "sadness-for-no-reason," this Hamlet in mule-ear boots admires only one thing: horses. Clopping into the sunset on a favorite mare, he exults privately: "I love this scene. It has no booze or women in it." Indeed, it is when those two components are added that the troubles begin.

Fitzpatrick returns to the family ranch after a stint as a NATO tank captain patroling the Berlin Wall. Borders are just as tense back home. His cantankerous grandfather goes on living and seething beyond his time; a sister with "insufficient resistance to pain of every kind" opts for the lesser agony of suicide. The lonesome cowboy finds purpose only in pursuing Claire, the icy wife of a "vivid . . . piercey-bright, oilman feisty" pseudo-patron named Tio. The result is McGuane's standard mano a mano struggle in which the prize is less significant than the battle itself.

In the past the author has strained to pack too many ironic asides to the paragraph. In Nobody's Angel he allows some breathing space between wordplay. Unfortunately, a powerful sense of place and character is not sufficient to sustain an entire novel. The hero's sentimental nihilism and unfulfilled longings undo the hard work that has gone before, and the final epiphany--the revelation that there is no revelation--is too dim to illuminate Nobody's Angel. McGuane has not so much made the Old West new as buried many of the romantic myths under a modern veneer of laconic prose and cowboy Weltschmerz. Fitzpatrick, and apparently McGuane, believes that quadrupeds do not disappoint like bipeds. The trouble is, novels with more affection for the equine than the human tend to gallop only for a short stretch. And then, all too frequently, they pull up lame. --By Richard Stengel

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