Comparisons have been made between McGuane's work and that of a variety of precursors. In his easy manipulation of dialogue and brilliant excesses of style, he has been associated with Faulkner. His curious attachment to the flotsam of contemporary life and his stinging indictment of America in the age of neon and television recall the fiction of Donald Barthelme; in his attention to bewildered people desperately clinging to the remains of a fractured world, he most closely resembles Thomas Pynchon.

McGuane himself has credited Stephen Crane and especially Mark Twain as profound influences, along with such contemporary novelists as Kurt Vonnegut and Jim Harrison.

The most persistent association to McGuane's fiction has been with that of Ernest Hemingway. In everything from common locales (in Key West and the Rockies) to the love of sport fishing, to the detection of Hemingwayesque "codes" governing the behavior of men...