A WOODED SHORE

Nine stories of dead-end lives and wide-open spaces, set mainly in the American West.

This slim collection from the Montana master seems like kind of a coda to his prolific career. It provides plenty of bleak comedy, as morally compromised characters face mortality and determine that their lives haven’t amounted to much of anything, their existence seems as barren as the landscape surrounding it. In the opening “Wide Spot,” a cynical politician offers a first-person narrative in which a reunion leads to an inappropriate seduction attempt. In “Balloons,” a physician with a dying patient offers another first-person narrative about the surprising retribution he faces for an affair that ended long before. From there, the perspective in these stories generally shifts to third person, but there’s nothing approaching omniscience. The protagonists, usually male, on the downside of middle age, are typically careless and often clueless. The natural splendor of their American West has been undermined by grifters: “Life in the West was a beautiful idea, best left in that state, a conviction not easily conveyed.…The place was infested with land speculators: house flippers, ranch flippers, and river flippers.” Two of the stories feature protagonists who have achieved some financial success, a good distance from Montana, and both are as miserable as the drifters and losers in the rest. In “Thataway,” a chain-store furniture magnate living in Palm Springs returns home for the funeral of one of his all-but-estranged sisters. The disastrous visit makes him realize that he has no home, and on the return trip to California “he had a fleeting hope that the plane would stay up in the air.” The concluding title story is the longest and perhaps the darkest, as a river trip fraught with tension and peril reveals the dysfunction of a tycoon’s family.

Flinty and sharp-edged, these stories show no sign that the octogenarian McGuane is softening up.