The Bushwhacked Piano is especially noteworthy for the verbal pyrotechnics that have come to be associated with Thomas McGuane. Equipped with a keen ear for voices and a love for the music of the language, and absolutely fearless of giving offense, McGuane plunges into this novel and emerges with a parade of sparkling metaphors and outrageous stylistic eccentricities, from warped cliches to broken similes, from super-cool slang to lush literary exposition. McGuane has sometimes been accused of glibness, and of a love for the wisecrack that comes at the expense of the fiction, but his best jokes are as funny as anything written by an American of this century, and place him squarely as a practitioner of black humor equal to Joseph Heller or Philip Roth.

The Bushwhacked Piano also indicates McGuane's affinity for film, both in the quality of its images and in its frequent similarity to...