Book description
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 to
a marriage that ought, by general consent, 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 bedevilled by them. And as her mother and
sister court this twisted inheritance, her own yearnings point toward
a way of life once habitual on the western plains but now embodied
only by Bill Champion, the family's ranch foreman and Evelyn's one
true compass.
The Cadence of Grass is at once an elegy and a masterpiece of
savage comedy from one of the most compelling novelists writing today.
Thomas McGuane is the author of short fiction, screenplays, essays
and several highly acclaimed novels, including
The Sporting Club, The
Bushwacked Piano,
Ninety-two in the Shade
, which was nominated for the National Book Award; and, most recently,
The Longest Silence: A Life in Fishing
. He was born in Michigan and now lives with his family in McLeod,
Montana.
