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Frances insists that all contact be temporarily severed between Tray and his Waters grandparents. Peter is adopting him and his parents will become Tray's paternal grandparents. It's only temporarily, she assures Charlie and Molly, until Tray has adjusted to his new situation. But Charlie and Molly, distraught at the death of their only child, long for visits with their only living blood descendant.
Desperate for visitation rights with Tray, Charlie and Molly go to court. They have a chance, says their lawyer. They live in a state which allows visits by grandparents if the court rules that they are "in the best interests of the child." But Peter has legally adopted Tray, and Charlie and Molly didn't contest the adoption. Legally, Charlie and Molly are no longer Tray's grandparents.
Troubled that the judge might rule that allowing Charlie and Molly to visit is in Tray's best interests, and pregnant again with Peter's child, Frances is upset at the prospect of a prolonged court battle. But she will not change her mind. Tray is her child and she resents interference from others over how she will raise him.
How will the judge rule?
The reader's heart nearly breaks during the sections about Charlie's retirement, and his and Molly's feeling disconnected from their power sense of family. But the lonely Frances, abandoned by her irresponsible first husband and his wanderlust, who has now found happiness and security in her new marriage, arouses compassion and empathy as well. Above all, the reader wants to know how Tray is doing with all the fighting in the background of his life. So does the judge, which brings about the resolution of the story. It's a powerful portrayal of four adults who can't stop loving the child that links them all.
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In The Cadence of Grass, McGuane shows another step in his growth and finally, much to his chagrin, and despite all his attempts to demand otherwise, he shows us that age has brought him wisdom, as well as contemplation of mortality.
Is this his novel about death? No, death was dealt with face-to-face in Nobody's Angel, McGuane's cathartic wrestling with his sister's death in real life. The Cadence of Grass is about the events leading up to death. That we all die is of course a given, and although a patriarch's death is the McGuffin for this story, it is the events that lead up to and directly lead to death that he deals with for the first time in his writing. Until now, there was always a pervasive sense of immortality in McGuane's characters, even when some of them died. Cadence takes us up close to the events, and even the moments, that precede death, including the acknowledgement of those about to die that they are living those preceding moments. McGuane exposes his own vulnerability, his own personal weaknesses through his characters in this book, and one gets the feeling that unlike other of his novels, in which his feelings usually occupy only one character, in Cadence he spread out his feelings among all the characters, perhaps as a way of making the expression of those feelings less burdensome. I feel that if he graced one character with all this contemplation it would have made the character too intense and maudlin to let the story breathe. As it is, McGuane keeps honed his clever, sometimes cryptic dialogue and hilarious descriptive powers, but lets more of the weaknesses of humanity come through and rather than using them for comic effect, he sympathizes with those who show weakness and vulnerability, as if to finally say "I know I've made fun of all of you in the past, but I really do know how you feel."
In his ealier novels McGuane often wrote of characters on the verge of great changes, and carried us through the changes with the character. In The Cadence of Grass, the changes have happened, the transitions are over, and we are allowed to see something McGuane has not dealt with so much before, and that is what the changes have wrought, how the characters carry on, and what lies at the end of the trail.