The Sporting Club by Thomas McGuane

First published: 1969

Type of plot: Regional satire

Time of work: The late 1960’s, on the occasion of the Centennial Club’s centennial celebration

Locale: Michigan, the Northern Lower Peninsula

Principal Characters:

• James Quinn, the protagonist, a Michigan businessman seeking escape in the Club’s sporting life
• Vernor Stanton, Quinn’s friend, a madcap, sadistic, practical joker
• Janey, Stanton’s chain-smoking girlfriend
• Jack Olson, a Northern Lower Peninsula native and the Club’s manager
• Earl Olive, a purveyor of live bait who replaces Olson as the Club’s manager
• Fortescue,
• Scott, and
• Spengler, old-time Club members; a collector of military miniatures, an obsequious professor, and the Club chronicler, respectively

The Novel

In the epigraph to The Sporting Club, Thomas McGuane quotes a line from Aristophanes: “Whirl is king.” Indeed, in this comic tale of the destruction of “the grandest of the original sporting clubs,” the whirl of absurdity reigns. The story’s action takes place on the occasion of the Centennial Club’s hundredth anniversary. James Quinn and Vernor Stanton, boyhood friends and rivals, join a host of other wealthy Michigan Club members for fun and games in the northern woods. Yet what promises to be a time of reunion, sport, and cameraderie turns into a bizarre nightmare of duels, dynamiting, and depravity.

Following an official description of the Club in “Blucher’s Annals of the North (Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1919),” the action turns to the reunion of Quinn and Stanton. Quinn, who has recently assumed the running of his father’s tool-and-die business out of a piqued social conscience, arrives at Centennial Club for a much-needed vacation. The business itself is going well, but Quinn has difficulties managing his overbearing, error-prone Canadian secretary, Mary Beth Duncan. He fares no better at the Centennial Club, however, for upon his arrival he learns that Stanton, a dynamo of competitive aggression and sadistic practical jokes, is there with his “wife.” Their initial meeting results in a duel, provoked by Stanton and conducted in his basement dueling range, wherein Stanton’s well-aimed shot raises a welt the size of a great wasp sting over Quinn’s heart. The manner and outcome of the duel illustrate the power that Stanton has over Quinn throughout the book. Against his better sense, Quinn inevitably allows himself to be drawn into Stanton’s schemes. Quinn’s love-hate relationship with Stanton parallels that of Stanton’s “wife”—actually his girlfriend, Janey—a blonde chain-smoker of mineral-springs origins who likes Stanton’s sexual prowess sufficiently to endure his habitual assaults on her ego. Quinn and Janey on occasion appear to be interested in each other (Stanton puts a stop to any serious flirting on their part with an adeptly placed shot to Quinn’s throat), but neither can break free, and consequently both of them continue to orbit Stanton, charmed by his egomaniacal heroics.

The personal stories of Quinn, Stanton, and Janey converge with the Club’s story in a plot, masterminded by Stanton, to oust Jack Olson, the Club’s manager. A native of the region and a born sportsman, Olson embodies all the qualities that the Club members lack. Further, many of the Club’s landholdings have been acquired through legal subterfuge from men such as Olson—locals who, because they lack money and political clout, are forced to sell to the socially and financially more powerful Centennial Club. Because he knows the land and its game (having poached the Club’s holdings for years), Olson maintains the job as manager, but his presence rankles the gentlemen hunters who lack his expertise, and their resentment serves Stanton’s machinations. Quinn, on the other hand, admires Olson and aspires to his quality of sportsmanlike conduct. On a fishing jaunt with Olson and Stanton, Quinn sticks with Olson, and the two “fish deferentially and await their occasions”—in contrast to Stanton, who tries “to beat fish out of the water.” It is Stanton, however, who emerges with a catch, and this event portends for Quinn “the beginnings of something catastrophic.”

Having surfaced in “Northern Gentlemen,” the book’s first chapter, Stanton’s plan to fire Olson comes to fruition in the second, “Native Tendencies.” Here, the new manager—a live-bait dealer named Earl Olive—appears. A flamboyant dresser, a raper of wildlife and women, Olive epitomizes the physically anarchic or “native tendencies” operating within the Club and undermining its rational veneer. Olive’s ascension to managerial status is heralded by the mysterious shooting and gutting of a doe and young buck, an act that would have been unheard of under Olson’s tutelage. Furthermore, the orgiastic shenanigans of Olive and his cohorts clarify the mounting dissension within the Centennial Club itself between Stanton and the more staid members. Quinn, maneuvering among his friendship with Stanton, his desire for Janey, his respect for Olson, and his loyalty to the more noble aspirations of the Club, becomes, in the end of this chapter, the victim of the Centennial Club’s moral disintegration. Caught in a watery torrent unleashed when unknown parties dynamite the Club lake, Quinn realizes that everything he knows of the Club is gone. The only certainty left him is “the few, clear lines” that keep “himself, Stanton, Janey, everybody, precisely separated.”

The final chapter, “Centennial Moon,” sees the total devolution of the Club and its members and the final ascension of Stanton as its private owner—the ascension of “whirl,” or the source of chaotic action within the story, as “king.” Much of the action of this chapter occurs as military skirmishes between the Club members and Olive’s zany group. Yet while in “Native Tendencies” the Olive camp revealed its native grossness—highlighted by the image of a beer-gutted male and a fleshy woman fornicating astride a moving Harley-Davidson—the decorous Centennial Club members now show their base underside. From their seat of operations—a large, unhygienic tent raised after the dynamiting of the Club buildings—the Centennial Club members foray into the night to carry out their centennial celebration: the unearthing of a time capsule left by their sporting ancestors. Its sole content, an aging photograph captioned “Dearest Children of the Twentieth Century, Do You Take Such Pleasure as Your Ancestors,” exposes the Club’s grand heritage—a vision of sexual sport flaunting “every phase of the spectrum of perversion.” Its dark side brought to light, the Club explodes in a conflagration of rhetoric and rocketry as Fortescue and Spengler attempt to extol the Club’s ancient virtues while Quinn, Stanton, and Olive skirmish intermittently. In the frenzy, Fortescue turns up tarred and feathered, Stanton holds everyone at bay with a machine gun, and the police arrive. Yet while the Club expires, releasing “a century of bad air,” its former sportive glories are revived when Stanton purchases it for his private domain. Meeting there in the new year, Quinn and Stanton (with Janey looking on) engage in a mock duel fought with plywood-cutout guns. In the end, the three of them retire to bed, Quinn musing over the felt presence of each of them, “compromised and happy . . . like bees in cells of honey.”

The Characters

James Quinn, whose arrivals at the Centennial Club open and close the book, emerges as its central character. His perceptions and adventures provide the novel’s continuity. It is his change in attitude toward Stanton—from his reticence to see Stanton in the beginning to his sense of himself as Stanton’s moral bedfellow in the end—that enacts the only character transformation in the story. Given the explosive energies ignited in the destruction of the Centennial Club and its pretensions, this transition seems a meager outcome. Quinn, though content with his compromise, remains separate from Stanton and, more important, from Janey, in his cell-like existence.

Vernor Stanton changes little, if at all. He is as obnoxious at the end as he is at the beginning. His demeanor toward Janey and Quinn appears somewhat restrained in the final scene—after all, the mock duel hurts no one—but this civility is countered by his crude treatment of his servants. Stanton is probably best imaged in one of his youthful escapades, which Quinn describes for Janey—a brazen contest wherein Stanton lowered his pants in a restaurant and “contrived by an imperceptible movement of his feet to present a Full Moon,’ that is a 360-degree view.” Stanton’s value for Quinn, however, lies precisely in the man’s perverse idiosyncrasy.

Like Quinn, Janey is victimized by Stanton and at the same time finds his outrageous energies irresistible. She is his second choice—Stanton took up with her only after being dumped by her Aunt Judy—but cannot leave him. Nor can she and Quinn imagine a way to get together. Consequently, they center their own relationship on Stanton, each telling the other his or her story in terms of when and how Stanton appeared on the scene. In the end, Janey maintains her position with Stanton—she appears as the lady of his house—but her primary function is that of cueing him in dinner conversation, and her relationship with Quinn is reduced to a “careful familial heartiness.”

The passing of the Club managership from Jack Olson to Earl Olive marks a moral transition within the Club itself. Consequently, these two characters define the parameters of that transition. A native son of the region, Olson knows the land and its wildlife; he values the sport of hunting and “the hard-earned ritual that made it sane.” Sport, for Olson, is a kind of stewardship “because he guaranteed the life of the country himself.” In contrast, Olive not only has a police record for sex offenses but also is a moral offense to Olson’s sense of life and sport. Olson, for example, thinks that fishing with bait is sacrilege; Olive, a live-bait man, gets his worms by electrifying the ground and his grasshoppers by driving a car rigged with cheesecloth netting at top speed through a field. Olive’s reliance on machinery, as well as his disregard for life and its civilities, elucidate the pretensions of the Club members who want to be rid of Olson. As a kind of nouveau-genteel class, they aspire to Olson’s native talents, but they lack his moral relation to sport and, as a consequence, hate him for their failure. Olive—who is hired by Olson as his own replacement—constitutes the ultimate revenge of the region upon the wealthy Centennial interlopers.

Critical Context

Despite The Sporting Club’s veneer of realistic narrative—a stylistic device evident in the “straight” descriptions of trout fishing and in the allowance for character motivation and recognizable plot—which parallels the Club’s veneer of rational order and decorum, the book appears to be a contemporary antinovel. The inherent alienation born of Quinn’s moral passivity (a condition that he perceives in those “few clear lines” that isolate him from his friends and from life) is reflected in the stylistic distance occasioned by an essentially authoritative narrative voice.

Thomas McGuane has been compared to Ernest Hemingway, and in his passages describing man in nature—in the forest, in the desert, on the ocean—McGuane does achieve an eloquent simplicity reminiscent of Hemingway. Yet while Hemingway’s style evolves a new narrative wherein the loss of old certainties opens into a universe of creative possibilities, McGuane, in his first novel, takes the path of contemporary writers such as Joseph Heller and John Barth, who suggest that insanity is the appropriate response to a world gone mad. In effect, McGuane answers modernist nihilism with absurdist parody.

McGuane’s ironic tone toward his protagonists and their universe, along with his pessimistic worldview, prevents his fiction from being easily accessible. The ambivalence created by his alternatingly bitterly humorous and tragically pessimistic tone can be puzzling—one is not sure how the author intends his characters to be perceived. Yet in such later novels as Nobody’s Angel and Something to Be Desired, McGuane’s antiheroes have become more sympathetic, and his themes, such as the necessity for love in human relationships and the alarming decline of a national morality in America, have emerged more clearly through his often elliptical and always ironic style.

Bibliography

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.

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.

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.”

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.