SOURCE: "'Unextended Selves' and 'Unformed Visions': Roman Catholicism in Thomas McGuane's Novels," in Renascence, Vol. IL, No. 2, Winter, 1997, pp. 139-52.

In the following essay, McClintock discusses Roman Catholic spirituality themes in McGuane's novels, particularly in Panama and Nobody's Angel.

Thomas McGuane's novels, short stories, essays, and screen plays place him among the best contemporary American writers. Reviewers have uniformly commented on his constant and redeeming wit in portraying suffering, alienated male protagonists, even though academic critics have neglected his work. For twenty-five years Thomas McGuane has employed a masterful range of language and comic imagination to write about these protagonists, adrift in a vulgar contemporary American culture, who are limited, furthermore, by their own "unformed visions" and "unextended selves."

Almost without exception, however, critics and reviewers have failed to notice that McGuane's topics, themes, and language are frequently, if not obviously, religious, and that McGuane belongs in the...