I am nothing of an expert in McGuane's career or life. In fact, reading this book, and having a vague sense his 1985 he-man-isms were the product of an older man at the time, I had a vague question in my head - nothing as well-formed as a theory - that the thinness and sketchiness of Something to Be Desired was due to McGuane being old or even dying during the writing of it, so it could be forgiven or even celebrated as a triumph of his writing power.
But I checked afterward. McGuane was born in 1939. This was his fifth novel. He's written four more since then, and is still alive today. So I have to revise my theory, and say that this is just how he wanted to write this story: to have a main character who falls backwards into everything, but usually success; to have women who are cyphers at best and sex-rewards or markers for time passing most often; and to have a plot that meanders vaguely and randomly and mostly functions to allow McGuane to toss in his various post-Hemingway musings and attempted Deep Thoughts.
I've only read one McGuane novel before - The Bushwacked Piano - and so any general conclusions I might draw will be badly-informed and slapdash. But both of those novels focus on one guy, and my description of Piano's hero as a "magnificent asshole" applies almost as well to Something's Lucien Taylor as well.
Like Piano, Something begins with an Important Moment in its hero's youth, so we readers are clear that he's messed up because of his relationship with His Daddy. Again, I can't say if McGuane does this consistently throughout his career, but both of these novels are in the the hyper-masculine mid-century style, featuring men who are endlessly self-destructive in ways that never quite damage them in any serious way, endlessly attractive to only the women that readers of these books will find compelling and sexy, and endlessly lucky as the author presses his greasy thumb on the scales to make sure every last aspect of their lives works out for the best in the end, after the requisite amount of hell-raisin' and drinkin' and whorin', of course.
Something mostly takes place over about a year - it's vague in this, as it is in so many things - in Lucien's life. You see, Lucien had Two Great Loves of His Life in college: Emily, who was wild and with whom he would have been two twinned artists' spirits, and Suzanne, who was stable and solid and who he eventually married after Emily dumped him for a doctor.
That was some number of years in the past - let's say ten, since Lucien and Suzanne have a son, James, whose age is never clear in any way whatsoever. (He could be a typical five, or a dreamy ten. McGuane is only interested in the sons of his heroes as signposts to their virility and markers of his line-of-men theories.) Lucien has been working around Latin American for USIA.
But Emily has just murdered her husband, for reasons the novel never quite gets into but assures us are he-was-abusive and entirely justifiable, and, besides, it means she's available for Lucien again, which is the real point. So Lucien immediately abandons his non-working wife and young son in the foreign country his job dragged them to with one of the most obnoxiously stereotypical "I need to figure myself out" speeches in literature, and flies back to his beloved Montana to circle Emily and try to get into her pants and/or save her from the consequences of her actions.
Lucien puts up the money for Emily's bail - where a mid-level foreign-service functionary has that kind of money is never clear; Lucien in general does not seem to be leading the life he actually has in this novel, but something closer to the life of rich, famous writer Thomas McGuane, fawned on by all and serially married - and her ranch is put up as security for his money. This doesn't seem to align to how bail actually works, but, anyway, Emily runs off with another guy to avoid trial and Lucien loses his money but gets the ranch, which seems to be more valuable.
Lucien mopes around, off-handedly sleeping with all of the female barflies of the fictional town of Deadrock - one of them gets a name and almost a personality; she is, of course, crazy. He then gets a bank loan, in a scene that even McGuane doesn't seem to want anyone to believe, and converts a hot spring on the ranch into a massively successful and lucrative spa. Lucien finds running the spa, and generally being a functional, useful adult, to be unpleasant, but he does it, perhaps in McGuane's attempt to show his growth as a person.
He hectors Suzanne, first at long distance - though she seems to have returned to Montana at some point as well - and then in person, when he installs her in a cabin on the spa's land, to return to him, because he's learned his lesson now that he's rich and the crazy women ran away from him.
Suzanne, I'm sorry to say, does somewhat reconcile with Lucien, or at least seems to be heading that way late in this short novel. But, of course, we learn that Emily has killed the guy she ran away with as well - crazy bitches gonna be crazy, right? - and she comes back...for no good reason from her point of view, and really only for McGuane's narrative purposes.
At this point, there's maybe a dozen pages left in the novel: this is a short book and McGuane does not go into detail of anything ever other than Lucien's random he-man thoughts about random bullshit. It has an ending that I seriously hope McGuane didn't intend to be reminiscent of Casablanca - Lucien sticks Emily on a plane with a speech - and then he watches Suzanne drive off with James for a roadtrip the she promises she will return from. And...scene!
I think McGuane is a writer for men of his generation, and maybe somewhat for the generation afterward (mine), but only for the ones already steeped in all of the outdoorsy, he-man women-haters club mindset. His work is often described as funny, and he does have a wit and energy to his writing, but it's in the service of these horrible assholes, and I have a hard time seeing the appeal. I would very much not recommend McGuane to women readers, or to any men readers who have actually liked and understood women at any point in their lives.
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