“Gallatin Canyon”

In the previous essay I discussed the three qualities that Philip Larkin considered to be necessary in a successful novel or short story. Believability is one that I find to be conspicuously lacking in today’s literary fiction. How about an example? This piece makes meanspirited fun of a short story by a living author, but if writers offer up nonsense (and they do, they do), they need to be called to task. Anyway, Thomas McGuane has received enough acclaim to offset my opinion. Ideally, you should read the story before considering my take on it. Public libraries usually carry the Best American series.

            When I first read Thomas McGuane’s “Gallatin Canyon” (in The New Yorker) I was baffled. Despite its straightforward presentation of plot and character, I was left with a “What’s wrong here?” feeling. On the second reading (in Best American Short Stories 2004), it dawned on me that the characters were acting strangely. A third reading led me to an inescapable conclusion.

            The following synopsis, though selective and interspersed with my personal commentary, is a reasonably faithful depiction of what McGuane wrote.

            The nameless first person narrator (I’m going to call him Bob) wants to weasel out of an agreement he made to sell a car dealership. He plans to accomplish this by insulting the buyer, a small town businessman, thus making the rube mad enough (as Bob imagines) to storm, red-faced, out of the closing. Not only is Bob’s plan odd, but even odder is that he wants his woman friend (they’ve had a relationship for several years) to be present as he carries on like a dishonest lout. It’s not as if she’s a co-conspirator; at one point she says, “Why don’t you just let this deal close? . . . there’s a good-faith issue here.”

            We aren’t in Louise’s mind, but she comes across as passive and distant. She puts limits on the time she and Bob spend together. She had been married briefly, and during that period she developed, in her words, “doubtful behaviors” — such as pulling out her eyelashes and eating huge amounts of macadamia nuts. Her husband must have found the marriage stressful too; after their divorce he sold his pharmacy and became a mountain man. Anyway, she agrees to go along on this business trip.

            On the drive these two show an absence of emotional affinity. Bob thinks really hard about this. He’s “powerfully attached to her” but she’s withholding. “Though ours was hardly a chaste relationship, real intimacy was relatively scarce.” He “adored her when she was a noun” but “was alarmed when she was a verb.” At one point her hand drifts to rest on his leg and he reacts with the following thought: “my interest traveled to the basics of the human species.” He feels an urge to “cleave” to her, “to build a warm new civilization.” Suddenly he blurts out the words “I wonder if we shouldn’t just get married.” Louise quickly looks away, leaving his comment unanswered. They drive the rest of the way — how long this takes McGuane doesn’t say — in silence.

            To get to the town they take the Gallatin Canyon route. In the first paragraph the highway they’ll traverse is described as “too narrow” and on the second page we learn that the canyon regularly “spat out corpses.”

            When they get to the conference room of the title company, Louise asks, “Shall I stay?” (Bob “intuits” her question to mean that she has not completely rejected his proposal of marriage.) He says, “Please,” and gestures to the chair next to his.

            The buyer enters and tells Bob that it was good to see him again. Bob answers, with “grotesque hauteur,” that he didn’t realize they had ever met. The insults continue. Bob gets into this. “Like a Method actor, I already believed my part.”

            Louise shifts uncomfortably in her chair, then begins to observe Bob “open-mouthed.” Under everybody’s puzzled gazes, Bob loses heart. He begins to backpedal. “I found no one who was interested in rescuing me — least of all Louise, who had raised one eyebrow at the vast peculiarity of my performance.” He gives his head “a little twist to free my neck from the constrictions of my collar. I had performed this gesture too vigorously, and I had the feeling that it might seem like the first movement of some sort of dance filled with sensual flourishes and bordering on the moronic. I had lost my grip.”

            Bob capitulates, signs the papers. They leave the small town at night, and as they pass through a murky section of forest they see the pale faces of children waiting to cross the road. “What are they doing out at this hour?” asks Bob. Louise answers, “I don’t know.”

            At this point, on the third reading, I did “know.”

            The pale-faced children are aliens. And so are Bob and Louise.

            Why did it take me so long to realize what McGuane was up to? Why did I twice overlook such an obvious prop as pale-faced children? Probably because the author, who was a Wallace Stegner fellow in creative writing at Stanford, is someone whose work is taken seriously. And The New Yorker and the Best American Short Stories represent the pinnacles of literary fiction. 

            Another factor that misled me is that McGuane’s aliens have advanced greatly from the ones in old films like “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.” In that movie they spoke in a monotone, walked stiffly, etc. They had trouble being outwardly human. The aliens in “Gallatin Canyon” appear to be normal. They hold jobs. They interact socially. On their home planet there must be training sessions in which they study material we transmit over the air waves; thus they learn how Earthlings talk, move, behave, etc. (though they don’t seem to have a firm grasp as to what is outdated; Bob’s use of archaic words such as “chaste” and “cleave” could be the result of watching too many episodes of Masterpiece Theater). Their bodies function like real human ones (at least most of the time; Bob did have difficulty with neck movements at the conference table). 

            However, once on Earth the biggest obstacle for these present-day aliens is simulating human emotions, and in intimate relationships they’re faced with a bewildering array of them. My initial “What’s wrong here?” feeling came during the car trip, when Bob and Louise’s inability to connect was on display.

            Some may have doubts about Louise being an alien. That’s because we’re in Bob’s thoughts, so he’s the one exposed. Actually, this speculation about Louise is moot, because she’ll openly state, later in the story, that she has a peculiar shortcoming.

            If they’re both aliens, you ask, why were they unable to recognize each other as such? A possible answer is that they come from different solar systems (McGuane leaves a lot for the reader to fill in). At any rate, after Bob’s performance at the closing, in which he reveals what he really is, Louise gives him the frigid shoulder. Her mission on this planet is to infiltrate human life, not waste time with another extraterrestrial.

            Now the story moves to the climax that was so subtly foreshadowed. On the Gallatin Canyon highway a car suddenly closes in behind them, its beams on high. Bob slows down, but the car stays glued to their bumper. When Bob pulls to the side of the road and stops, the car does too. Louise says two things: “This is strange” and “This is not normal.”

            Is another alien following them? Could be, since this is pale-faced children country. Why his hostile actions? Like I said, McGuane leaves a lot unexplained. Probably the driver is just a human nut case. I can’t say for sure.

            Bob, who knows this stretch of highway, devises a plan to escape his pursuer. He speeds up as he goes through a sharp curve, then he hits the brakes, pulls into a scenic turnoff and switches the headlights off. The car behind him shoots past, loses control, crashes through a guardrail and plunges into the river. Bob drives to the spot where the car went in; he and Louise get out in time to watch the headlights sink into blackness.

            Bob muses: “Any hope we might have had for the driver — and we shall be a long time determining if we had any — was gone the moment we looked down from the riverbank.”

            This sounds meaningful. But would a real human indulge in such musings? I’m human, and the choice I’d face — in brief consultation with my lady friend — would be whether to call the police. But what could the police do? No, we’d get in the car and hightail it off down the road. If contacted by the police (very unlikely) we’d claim no knowledge of any accident. Sure, it would be a disturbing incident, and one hard to forget. But, unlike Bob, I wouldn’t spend “a long time determining” if I had “any hope.”

            There’s a logical explanation for Bob’s dilemma. He’s trying to grasp the concepts he learned in training sessions. He surely heard again and again in our newscasts how humans “still hold out hope for survivors.” Then there’s the concept regarding the sanctity of life, and the one about guilt. He may be recalling all the films and TV dramas in which people risk their lives to rescue other humans. Thus his confusion.

            Some readers may perceive an important issue at stake here, a moral test which Bob and Louise fail. To them the honorable course of action would be for Bob to scramble down the embankment, leap into the rushing water, dive down to the submerged car, get the door open, pull the driver out and bring him to the surface. It’s naive readers like this that McGuane is cleverly toying with.

            Anyway . . .

            As they stand by the broken guardrail, Louise cries out her revealing words:

            “I wish I could feel something!” Of course she does. She’s an alien who wishes she could get this human emotion thing right. (I think she needs to be recalled.)

            Bob reaches out “to comfort her,” but she shoves him away.

            The ending of the story rises to true hilarity (it was only in my third reading that I was able to appreciate McGuane’s zany humor). Bob, still thinking Louise is human, tries to win her back. He investigates and learns some facts about the dead driver of the car, and here’s what he tells her, in three phone calls:

            Ploy #1. The driver had a record as long as your arm. (A pretty good effort, but Louise exclaims, “It’s not enough!”)

            Ploy#2. The driver was of German and Italian extraction. (What human, Bob reasons, wouldn’t be persuaded by that shocking revelation? I mean, German and Italian extraction! Still, Louise remains adamant.)

            Ploy #3. The driver was from Wisconsin. (A clincher, thinks Bob, but Louise hangs up the phone.)

            The end.

            Really. I’ve described the story as McGuane wrote it; my conclusions are based on his words. But you be the judge. You can find the story at your local library in the 2004 Best American. Also, McGuane put out a short story collection entitled Gallatin Canyon; the book got a front page rave review in the Sunday New York Times Book Review (with a photo of ol’ Tom looking like a weathered rancher). The reviewer especially admired the title story, though he never mentioned the alien angle. I wonder why. . . .

            Actually, when I read the fiction being written today, I find that thinking of the characters as aliens often makes their feelings and actions more plausible.