After a decade of Donald Trump’s chaos and cruelty, we might ask how literary fiction is responding. Readers, for their part, flocked to journalistic and historical explainers in Trump 1.0, then classics during the pandemic, followed by escapist genre fare and comfort reads in Trump’s second term. Writers attempting to capture the new now have met the Diet Coked-out American berserk in kind, as with the Rabelaisian excess of Tony Tulathimutte’s Rejection and Mark Doten’s Trump Sky Alpha . Other novelists have turned to acidic, class-conscious portraits of the underemployed—see Andrew Martin and Halle Butler. A third group embraced allegory, turning to history (Zadie Smith’s The Fraud ) and the supernatural (George Saunders’s Vigil ).

This work is excellent. Some, masterful. It also firmly operates within the political sphere of its reception: By the left, of the left, for the left. What of the writers living in red-state America? Are any of them capturing its denizens with a compassion their subjects can’t themselves reciprocate? And, while we’re at it, doing so with a voice that counters MAGA hyperbole with plainspoken wryness?

You can guess the answer, given the subhead above. The short fiction of octogenarian Thomas McGuane, as seen in his most recent collection A Wooded Shore , is quite possibly the most vital literature of the Trump era. And despite his accolades, he’s underrated and certainly underread.

His readers would disagree. (To know him is to love him.) For the past half-century he’s steadily produced novels, stories, and nonfiction—primarily about horses and fishing—with garlands sprinkled throughout. His third novel Ninety-Two in the Shade was a finalist for the National Book Award; fans say its baroque intelligence and post-hippie hangover were too real for the judges.

McGuane had remunerative dalliances with ’70s Hollywood, selling screenplays and hobnobbing with the inebriate tranche of the A-list. Plus the actual dalliances of the Arthur Miller-Marilyn Monroe variety. His first wife later married Peter Fonda; his second was Superman actress Margot Kidder; his third is the sister of the late Jimmy Buffett.

McGuane turned to short fiction relatively late in his career, and, like Donald Antrim, seemed preternaturally suited to it. Or perhaps he just loves a challenge. He’s said writing a story is “like trying to start a fire in the rain.” Upon the publication of his career-spanning Cloudbursts , the New York Times called him “a master of the short story.”

Chalk it up to stubbornness. McGuane is as committed to his vision as his characters are to theirs.

Eight years later, the man once nicknamed Captain Berserko is now more admired than read. Perhaps that red-state geography’s to blame. McGuane lives on a ranch in Big Sky Country—”out in the boonies, two miles from a town of six” ( link )—anomalous within publishing’s bicoastal affinities. His fiction is mostly set in rural Montana and Florida, and in small towns where time moves slowly. Grudges outnumber people. This is the “sunburnt otherwhere,” per Auden, easily exoticized by readers of The New Yorker and The Paris Review , where much of his new collection first appeared. (Rest assured there’s none of Taylor Sheridan’s mansplayed mise en scène, nor the myopic faux-revanchism.)