SOURCE: "Get Real," in Los Angeles Times Book Review, October 11, 1992, pp. 1, 11.

In the following review of Nothing But Blue Skies, Kittredge praises McGuane's ability to evoke the pathos of the disappearing natural landscape of the American West.

Tom McGuane's work has always been vibrant with the pleasures of ironic language, play and chase, and quick with the kind of brokenhearted humor that mirrors large-scale fracturing inside our society. We can't stand behind many of our preconceptions any more. The so-called nuclear family, for instance, mom and dad and the kids, the mortgage, the old folks back home, is a kind of vanishing species. And in Montana, where McGuane's new novel. Nothing But Blue Skies, is set, sometimes we can't even fish the same old streams. They're just gone.

"The creek was gone … ferns were dying on the banks, and here and there were the remains of fish, picked...