Something to Be Desired by Thomas McGuane

First published: 1984

Type of plot: Psychological realism

Time of work: 1958 to the 1980’s

Locale: Deadrock, Montana

Principal Characters:

• Lucien Taylor, an immature young man who has left his wife, his child, and his government job to come to the aid of a former lover who has shot her husband
• Emily, Lucien’s strong-willed and hard-hearted former lover who has killed her abusive husband and is fleeing the police
• Suzanne, Lucien’s strong-willed and tender-hearted former wife, who divorced him when he abandoned her and whose trust and respect he must work to regain
• Dee Thompson, Lucien’s unhappily married lover in Deadrock
• Wick Tompkins, Emily’s lawyer, who befriends Lucien
• W. T. Austinberry, Emily’s hired hand, whom she seduces and kills

The Novel

When Lucien Taylor in Thomas McGuane’s Something to Be Desired abruptly leaves his wife, child, and job to aid a former lover who has shot her abusive husband, his motives are not purely altruistic. He is restless and still finds Emily attractive. Eventually, he realizes that he desires neither adventure nor Emily but the love of his family; as he sets out to reclaim it, he acquires self-knowledge and a sense that his life finally has a “center” that makes it rewarding.

Something to Be Desired is divided into twenty chapters. Filled with Lucien’s memories, the third-person narrative is so closely focused on Lucien that it has the immediacy of a first-person tale.

In the first chapter, Lucien and his irresponsible father are entering the final, disastrous phase of their relationship. Long absent, the father has suddenly reappeared to take his son on an “adventure” camping trip. The boy and his father have been lost for two days. Before Lucien locates their campsite, they stumble upon and bathe in a hot spring.

Filled with self-pity, the father ends the trip abruptly. Lucien sees him pick up a prostitute along the way; the boy also watches him brutally strike his bitter and vengeful former wife before he leaves for good after a last drunken quarrel.

After years of living with his alcoholic and abusive mother, Lucien goes away to college, where he meets the other two women who will influence his life. Although he is obsessed with Emily’s beauty and passion, she leaves him to marry the other man with whom she has been having an affair. Lucien then meets and marries the beautiful Suzanne, who is as principled, generous, and stabilizing as Emily is unprincipled, selfish, and unsettling.

Common sense tells Lucien that Suzanne is Emily’s superior. Nevertheless, he is troubled by a “lack of high romance in his life.” When they learn that Emily has shot her husband, he abandons his family and goes to Emily’s ranch near the spring in Deadrock. While he admits that his behavior has begun “the process of stain” in him, Lucien also sees himself as carrying out a mission, part of which is to have Emily love him again, a feat he thinks he can accomplish by rescuing her—paying her bail. The doubts of Emily’s lawyer, Wick Tompkins, about her chances and character are confirmed when Emily disappears with W. T. Austinberry, the hired hand.

Left alone with the ranch, Lucien engages in a halfhearted affair with the unhappily married Dee. He begins to recognize that he is on the road to loneliness. After spending a year in a despairing, alcohol-induced daze, he announces that he is “going to start something tremendous.” Encouraged by Wick, he decides to transform the ranch and its spring into a spa. When the resort is hugely successful, Lucien calls Suzanne to tell her. Cautious but hopeful, she agrees to bring James to visit Lucien, who is “head over heels in love.”

Lucien continues the process of self-discovery. He reflects on his own mortality and on the importance of tradition and continuity. He realizes that he is not interested in making even more money, and his desire to provide his son with a sense of security continues to grow.

Lucien has other trials to undergo. Although James comes around, Suzanne does not. Dee announces that she is leaving, and Emily reappears, carrying a gun. Finally unmoved by her, aware that she could destroy his life, Lucien informs Suzanne of her arrival and tells Emily that she must leave. Partly in anger, Suzanne concludes her visit; while James twists around to wave goodbye, Suzanne “keeps her eyes on the road.”

The Characters

Lucien’s thoughts, actions, and language indicate that he finds it difficult, if not impossible, to make and to commit himself to choices that are clearly in his best interests. This Hamlet-like indecision seems to stem from his childhood. He was attracted by what he saw as the romance of his father’s life and is often driven, like his father, by sexual desires he refuses to control. Lucien (whose name suggests the devil that often seems to control him) is saved from self-destruction, ultimately, by his fine ironic sense and by his willingness to find a center to his life in the form of his son.

A lover of well-told tales, he often sees his life unrealistically, in terms of a story. In college, he is torn between two girls sketched in outlines suited to tales of the Old West; they have old-fashioned names and seem to represent vice and virtue. Even though the values and codes represented by the myths of the Old West appeal to him, he is not a storybook hero. As he rushes off to “save” Emily, he abandons his own child.

When he feels that he can go no lower, he finds that he can turn to his advantage resources that he has used successfully before: his organizational skills, his business acumen, and his “willingness to please.” He is a kind of fallen angel who starts to rise again as he begins to create a new life, this time one that he invests with meaning.

Suzanne is a stabilizing influence; she remains a wonderful wife and mother throughout. Suzanne rejected all other suitors to marry Lucien. Stung by his abandonment, she forces him to fight for her, as he did not before, until she considers him a responsible adult. Suzanne manages to occupy the moral high ground without appearing “sappy,” as Lucien thinks her to be at one point. Even though her unhappiness hardens her and makes her able to shock Lucien, she is still, in many ways, an idealized character.

Emily is the other woman, the bad girl whose most notable characteristics are selfishness and amorality. She represents the Wild West at its wildest. When she kills a second time, she becomes not only a villain but also a literal outcast from American society. Emily represents a dislocation of body and soul; in chasing her, Lucien sees, he is courting death.

Lucien’s father appears only in the opening chapter, but his presence haunts Lucien. He and his wife are the source of Lucien’s instability. Alcoholic, childish, self-pitying, and abusive, he is impulsive, ignoring the consequences of his actions and leaving loose ends everywhere. He runs from problems and lies to himself, excusing his behavior by telling Lucien that “we are all animals.” Lucien, sadly, recognizes that his father’s childish and underhanded approach to fighting with his wife is “wholly characteristic.” He is an antifather; a worse model is hard to imagine.

Dee’s behavior provides a counterpart to Lucien’s. Caught in an unhappy marriage, she has no illusions when she slips into an affair with Lucien. She surprises—and impresses—him when she breaks the slender tie that connects them to begin a new and independent life for herself. Dee is given a few sharp, ironic words to say; she appears mainly in the narrator’s description of their sad, squalid encounters.

Wick Tompkins, Emily’s lawyer, comes to like Lucien, and the obvious affection of this wise, amusing, and basically decent man for Lucien indicates that there is hope for Lucien’s future.

With the absurdly grand name of W. T. Austinberry, Emily’s hired hand is not even a cowboy in name only. He is another source of disillusionment to Lucien. A far cry from the idealized figure of the Old West, he has no love for the land. He is inadequate as a lover and contemptible as a sportsman; he dumps quantities of bleach into a river when he wants to catch fish.

Critical Context

Something to Be Desired, McGuane’s sixth novel and seventh book, was not as well received as his earlier novels. Critics faulted McGuane for inconsistent control of the narrative, for stylistic artificiality, for “working hard” to achieve certain effects, and for depending on familiar approaches to characterization and thematic development.

Generally, however, critics agreed that McGuane was moving in a new direction. At first, Lucien seems to be like McGuane’s other protagonists. They are nonconformists seeking personal fulfillment, often through unconventional means, and their searches usually end unsatisfactorily, if not disastrously. Lucien’s problems, however, do not seem to be self-imposed. Unlike the parents in McGuane’s earlier novels, Lucien’s mother and father are unstable emotionally and financially. In addition, Lucien’s unhappiness never brings him so low that he would willingly die. His comic sense is eventually accompanied by common sense, which in this case permits him to acknowledge his need for Suzanne and James.

The most obvious characteristics of McGuane’s novels—the machismo exhibited by his protagonists, their yearning for adventure and romance, the impossibility of their finding an appropriately glamorous vehicle for succeeding in that search, the spare, tough dialogue, the particular beauty of the passages dealing with natural settings, the eruptions of violence, and the concern with place, especially Key West and Deadrock—all of these have caused McGuane to be labeled a follower of Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner. Also apparent, however, are the effects of McGuane’s early interest in the romance and adventure found in the works of W. H. Hudson and Ernest Thompson Seton, and of his study and enjoyment of the “serious” comedy of Aristophanes, Lazarillo de Tormes, Miguel de Cervantes, Mark Twain, and Evelyn Waugh. This greater comic exuberance, the softening of the protagonist, and Lucien’s belief that “anything was possible once the center had been restored” indicate why McGuane has called Something to Be Desired a “positive” novel.

McGuane’s skill at using dialogue to reveal character is apparent in the numerous screenplays with Western themes that he wrote during and after a stay in Hollywood. He is one of a number of new writers, such as David Long and Rick Bass, who are reshaping the New West as a landscape for other writers and new readers to explore. He is also a literary critic and the author of numerous essays on hunting and fishing.

Bibliography

Book World. XIV, December 16, 1984, p. 10.

Ingram, David. “Thomas McGuane: Nature, Environmentalism, and the American West.” Journal of American Studies 29 (December, 1995): 423-469. Ingram examines McGuane’s focus on the old mythologies of the frontier in the ecology and politics of the modern American West. Ingram concludes that McGuane’s position of these issues is complicated and unclear, alternating between the liberal, radical, and conservative.

Kirkus Reviews. LII, August 15, 1984, p. 774.

Library Journal. CIX, November 1, 1984, p. 2080.

McCaffery, Larry, and Sinda Gregory. “The Art of Fiction LXXXIX: Thomas McGuane.” The Paris Review 27 (Fall, 1985): 35-71. Illuminating and immensely readable, this focuses on McGuane’s style, themes, and comic vision. The authors find in Something to Be Desired less “rambunctiousness,” more control over language, and more complex and subtle techniques of characterization than appear in the earlier novels.

McClintock, James. “ Unextended Selves’ and Unformed Visions’: Roman Catholicism in Thomas McGuane’s Novels.” Renascence: Essays on Values in Literature 49 (Winter, 1997): 139-152. McClintock examines the Roman Catholic themes in McGuane’s works. McClintock asserts that although McGuane’s works are not Catholic in an orthodox sense, he often investigates Catholic themes, topics, and use of language that specifically refers to Catholic matters.

Morris, Gregory. “How Ambivalence Won the West: Thomas McGuane and the Fiction of the New West.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 32 (Spring, 1991): 180-189. Excellent discussion of McGuane’s use of the “New West.” Argues that while both the language and the action of the novel illuminate Lucien’s attraction to the landscape and to the myths of the Old West, his efforts to find a place for himself in the New West require him to deny acceptance of the old.

Neville, Jill. “Getting Away from It All.” The Times Literary Supplement, May 17, 1985, p. 573. An interesting discussion that focuses not on the disappearance of the Old West but on Lucien’s “odyssey,” as he moves from being the son who refuses to put away childish things to the man who ceases being self-destructive and yearns for “health, emotional stability, and Nature.”

The New Yorker. LX, December 24, 1984, p. 88.

Newsweek. LV, January 21, 1985, p. 71.

Publishers Weekly. CCXXVI, September 21, 1984, p. 89.

Roper, Robert. “Lucien Alone in Deadrock.” The New York Times Book Review, December 16, 1984, p. 11. Asserts that Something to Be Desired is McGuane’s best book. Roper comments that McGuane’s comic gifts and lively style are well suited to conveying Lucien’s struggle to understand himself, to accept his “softer qualities” as he matures.

The Wall Street Journal. CCIV, December 24, 1984, p. 5.

Wallace, Jon. The Politics of Style. Durango, Colo.: Hollowbrook, 1992. Argues that McGuane finds language “an end in itself.” Although McGuane’s characters’ words and thoughts often seem incoherent or meaningless, Wallace claims, the mixed codes in his language reflect their fragmented sense of being and their attempts to bring themselves into being in a world without style or unity. Includes a useful bibliography.