Preview of Nothing But Blue Skies Summary:

Perhaps nowhere else in McGuane's fiction is the melding of theme and social awareness more complete than in Nothing But Blue Skies. Persistent as background noise here is McGuane's usual searing critique of the tabloid mentality of American public discourse, and its reduction of complexities of human emotion and desire to formulae of money and disinformation.

But while he is as capable as ever of satirically barbed throwaways, as when he notes that "everyone in California seemed surrounded by quotation marks," McGuane's point of view on the vagaries and excesses of American social life comes not in this novel from a struggling and unregenerate outsider.

On the contrary, the novel's protagonist, Frank Copenhaver, is already a successful Montana businessman when the novel opens. A small-scale tycoon, deal maker and speculator, with interests ranging from real estate to cattle ranching to rental car franchises to...