The Bushwhacked Piano

The idiosyncratic, slightly obscure, and critically acclaimed author Thomas McGuane is best known for his early novels, his short-lived career as a celebrity Hollywood screenwriter, and his later autobiographical essays about life in the outdoors. One of these early novels is The Bushwhacked Piano, a comical road adventure narrative published in 1971. Ostensibly about the attempts of its hapless hero to pursue the woman of his dreams across the U.S., the novel hangs on its key theme: the irrationality of human desires and ambitions. McGuane allies himself with various counterculture movements of the 1960s.

However, what critics have loved about this work isn’t its relatively simple plot, but McGuane’s use of lyrical, unusual, and highly inflected language. The novelist Thomas Berger described this book as “a sumptuous feast of language and wit,” since McGuane’s focus isn’t his surrealistic characters but instead an approach to words that echoes that of Thomas Pynchon. It is hard to convey exactly what Berger means without simply quoting the novel, so here is an example of the main character driving through Florida and seeing big-rig semis around him: “On either side, the serene seascapes seemed to ridicule the nasty two-lane traffic with monster argosy cross-country trucks domineering the road in both directions. From time to time, in the thick of traffic problems, Payne would look off on the pale sand flats and see spongers with long-handled rakes standing in the bows of their wooden boats steering the rickety outboard motors with clothesline tied to their waists.” The sentences are difficult to parse at first, as McGuane fills them with unusual words like “argosy” (a large merchant ship), and layers polysyllabic words on top of one other in surprising ways.

The novel’s main character is Nicholas Payne, whose brief stint at law school in Montana hasn’t ended well. He abandons the traditional hopes and dreams that becoming part of the professional class would have brought, and instead, sets out on a long road trip across the American South. Heading out in a green Hudson Hornet, his new goal is to pursue Ann Fitzgerald, a beautiful and somewhat out of reach heiress who is herself on a mission to live life to the fullest. This adventure has the added benefit of giving Nick an out from societal expectations, allowing him to fully explore his own oddball nature.



Nick and Ann have already been a couple (the novel includes several detailed sex scenes between them), but she runs off in order to escape her parents, who long for her to find a proper young man to add to their prim wealthy family and who detest Nick’s vague criminality, considering him psychologically freakish.

On the way, Nick teams up with CJ Clovis, a double amputee who revels in being the world's fastest-talking con man. CJ’s new venture is a get rich scheme that draws on his complex feelings about which bats are the best, classiest kind – Day-Glo bats. CJ would like to sell small communities on the concept of building bat towers (he calls them “batriums”) for these bats, arguing that they can rid any area of insects “practically overnight.” For Nick, this seemingly industrious plan seems like a reasonable occupation.

From here, the novel veers into a series of wild set pieces that don’t necessarily connect to the main plot but simply try to get at the weirdness that underlies what is known as the heartland, where “Sacagawea and Gerald McBoingBoing fought for the scraps of U.S.A. history.” In the cartoonish excesses, we meet a farmhand whose hobby is taking up-skirt of young women from beneath the floorboards of a bathhouse. There is a scene in a rodeo where a bronco-buster tells monologues while performing his tricks. We also get a better sense of the rich Fitzgeralds, who are described with a viciousness that makes them even more grotesque than the rest of McGuane’s gargoyle-like characters. In one memorable scene, Ann’s mother, Edna, attacks her father, Duke, with ballpoint pens and a protractor.



The novel’s last chapter is a near-hallucinatory description of Nick’s hemorrhoidectomy, which he suffers at the hands of a surgeon high on amphetamines and which is written as a “long, detailed, lovingly rendered medical expose.” In the end, Nick manages to reunite once again with Ann in the Florida Keys, briefly inverting the power dynamic in their relationship to be in his favor. However, this “happy” ending is undercut by the novel’s insistently cynical view of people. Whatever small kindness occurs tends to be accidental and immediately reversed.