SOURCE: "A Literary Quilt of Faded Colors," in Los Angeles Times Book Review, September 17, 1989, pp. 3, 10.

In the following review, Larsen criticizes McGuane's novel Keep the Change, calling it a "half-hearted work," of "tossed-together leftovers."

The irrepressible Thomas McGuane strides forth once again, in [Keep the Change], his 10th book and seventh novel, to take on nothing less than the breadth and troubled essence themselves of native life in end-of-the-century America. In the McGuane mode, it's a book that seems to set out to do all things—dazzle, satirize, embrace, lament, and perhaps at end to salvage the pieces of a lesser world. The work disappoints, though seeming itself, by the finish, to be less an antidote to that world than another piece of it.

The literary energies of the indefatigable McGuane can put a reader in mind of something like a many-colored quilt—there's the outdoor flavor and...