A Fine Time to Leave Me

By John Skow

TITLE: NOTHING BUT BLUE SKIES

AUTHOR: THOMAS MCGUANE

PUBLISHER: HOUGHTON MIFFLIN

THE BOTTOM LINE: The familiar splitsville novel is seen this time from the point of view of the undeserving male.

DIVORCE THESE DAYS IS OUR PARIS in the '20s, an adventure of alienation and unfamiliar cooking that we write novels about. Too many novels and too whiny the reader decides. The genre is one that is not petering out but should. Until then, an amiable and cheerfully unwhiny exception is Thomas McGuane's Nothing but Blue Skies. The author's hero is a fortyish Deadrock, Montana, ^ businessman named Frank Copenhaver, who misplaces his marbles when his wife Gracie packs her bags. In this addlepated condition, he galumphs about drinking too much (or not enough; this isn't clear), getting into fistfights, making rotten investments and then affronting his bankers, eating frozen dinners and, in general, swinging about half a second late at a variety of pitches, many from local divorced women who think on small evidence that he may be better than nothing.

As the wife-lorn hero goes googly, the world, of course, reciprocates. His beloved daughter reacts to her parents' split by dropping out of college to live with a raving-mad private-property fanatic older than her father. Frank's secretary quits. The price of cattle drops, just when he has a thousand head to sell. The hero, who is a decent enough fellow, just insensitive to women's needs, egomaniacal, undeserving and stuffed with the usual macho baloney, watches all this wonderingly but without resentment.

McGuane, whose recent novels have seemed a touch broody, enjoys himself with this one. The fine barrelhouse prose of The Bushwhacked Piano and Ninety-Two in the Shade is working again. He waves his arms, he hoots and hollers and thrashes out a rowdy parody of the male psyche under the stress of having to defend itself in the supermarket. Without taking sides, of course, between male and female, he makes it clear that what Frank needs is the loving care of a good woman. What will set female readers to muttering Wiccan incantations is the certainty that some patient woman, like as not his wife Gracie, will show up to glue Frank back together.