To be honest with you, I'm not really sure what this book was trying to say. I could spout off about a general plot, the characters and the like, but really I don't know if I landed on the reality what I read.
You have Vernon Stanton and James Quinn for main characters. All Quinn wants to do is be a gentleman and have gentlemanly sex with Janey or anyone who will have him, but unfortunately he keeps running into trouble with loose cannon Stanton; constantly getting caught up in the childish antics of his childhood chum. Stanton is a millionaire with a nasty habit of picking up dueling pistols at the slightest provocation. His behavior is often times outrageous and crass. I couldn't land on a solid plot that made sense and I couldn't find any redeeming qualities in the characters I met. There was an abundance of posturing, butt sniffing, and pardon my language, dick measuring. Luckily, it was a short read. ( )

“Everyone told me you’re slipping, Quinn, and I’m beginning to believe it…You look chastened. The fire is out in your great bunny eyes.”

With that observation Quinn’s buddy, Vernor Stanton, intensifies the challenges and orchestrations for asserting an edge that drive Thomas McGuane’s novel, The Sporting Club. Even Vernor’s initials, VS, call out his contentious nature. He is provocateur. He looms large. He wishes to recruit Quinn again to the cause: “Join me in making the world tense. We’ll foment discord.” Why tense? Why discord? It’s just what some men do.

James Quinn has come out from Detroit to vacation at the Centennial Club, a large private fishing and hunting preserve in Michigan at which he and Stanton are members. There, Stanton proves skilled at fomenting his desired discord and enlarging it. Among those discords we find, in the reckoning to be had with Earl Olive, the impetus for much of the climactic action. Olive is a curiosity of ignoble appetites and ill-disciplined judgment who’s been enlisted by the club as manager. That hire proves a decision with dismantling consequences.

McGuane’s imagination strains against constraint yet is grounded by an evident love for woods and for rivers. His language is rich. He’s literary. An example: Quinn intentionally shovels earth into the face of an annoying fellow club member and whilst they grapple Quinn quotes Hamlet, “I prithee, take thy fingers from my throat for, though I am not splenetive and rash yet have I in me something dangerous!” If not quite madness in Quinn (and it’s not quite not), it is observant, for the Club members and especially Vernor court spleen and rashness with ardor and even hazard to the soul.

While The Sporting Club seems built on individual conflict, it’s not limited to that. The Centennial Club members who are most aggressive in desiring retributive combat with Earl Olive remind one of the way countries get into wars. Not that Olive isn’t the sort to inspire fantasies of retribution but one can’t escape the notion that all these uncivil struggles have been manufactured so unnecessarily. We can see in the novel’s comedy a satire of the ruling class no matter how local it be. It’s also a burlesque of the outrageous myths some men fondly build round themselves, the errancies of which can take a centenary to unearth. See the novel for the colorful details. ( )

Two men vacation at the venerable Centennial Club, a rod and gun club in Michigan. James Quinn is the somewhat reluctant owner of an auto parts factory started by his father. He’s been second fiddle to alpha male Vernor Stanton since childhood – much of the trouble they caused was at the club.

Trouble starts again with other club members, with Stanton “pouring salt in every wound” and the club coming up against “functional, decisive and arbitrary” “bumpkins,” descendants of those from whom the club’s 29,000 acres was originally stolen. Dynamite is involved, and the destruction of a lake and eventually the club itself, with Stanton as the master of disaster. ( )

This is really a 4.5 star book but I felt like rounding up. The first half is completely disorienting- there is very little context given for who the characters are or why they are acting so crazy. I was about to give up but it was so sneakily funny that I kept going. I am so glad I did because McGuane takes the entire premise so much further than I ever expected- it's basically a comedic Heart of Darkness set in a country club. Brilliant! ( )

One of my least-favorite McGuane novels. It never felt cohesive and the characters seemed a little too cartoonish and the plot a little too looney.

I love McGuane's essays and some of his fiction, but not this one. ( )