A number of years ago, in a column in The Globe and Mail’s books section dedicated to great but forgotten books there was an article on Thomas McGuane’s The Bushwhacked Piano. Although I no longer remember specifically what the article had to say about it (apart from praising it), I do recall running out to a nearby second-hand bookshop and picking up a copy. But when I started reading it, I felt it wasn’t quite my cup of tea, as it were, and promptly set it aside. I also felt it was more artifice than art, plus a little too “Southern” for my taste, and went back to reading the kind of realism that I generally prefer.