Nobody’s Angel was published by Random House in 1982. It marks McGuane’s transition from the pyrotechnic Key West novels to the Montana work that would define his mature career. Patrick Fitzpatrick returns from the Army (he commanded an M-60 tank in Germany) to the family ranch near the fictional town of Deadrock, Montana. His grandfather is dying. His sister is an alcoholic. His ex-wife is remarried. The ranch is failing.
Patrick takes up training cutting horses — the precision of working cattle from horseback providing the discipline his life otherwise lacks. He pursues Claire Burnett, a married woman, with the same intensity he once brought to his military career. The affair is doomed — Claire will not leave her husband — and the novel builds toward Patrick’s recognition that the romantic intensity he craves is incompatible with the domestic stability he needs.
McGuane moved permanently to Montana in the late 1970s, quit cocaine, and began ranching — and the novel reflects this biographical transformation. The prose is more controlled than Panama or Bushwhacked Piano: still metaphorically rich but now disciplined by landscape and physical labor.
Collecting Nobody’s Angel
First edition (Random House, New York, 1982): Boards with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine in jacket: $30–$60
- Signed first: $60–$120
Projected values (2026–2036): Moderate appreciation. Marks the beginning of McGuane’s “Montana period.”
The Second Act
Nobody’s Angel (1981) represents McGuane’s reinvention: the Key West cocaine novel gives way to the Montana ranch novel, the manic picaresque gives way to a quieter, more controlled narrative. Patrick Fitzpatrick is still a McGuane hero — troubled, self-destructive, brilliantly observant — but the landscape has changed. Montana, with its vast emptiness and its demand for physical competence, gives the novel a gravity that the earlier Key West books, for all their brilliance, lacked.
Frequently Asked Questions
Where in Montana does McGuane live? McGuane has ranched near McLeod, Montana, in the Boulder River valley, since the early 1970s. He raises cutting horses and cattle. The landscape around McLeod — the Absaroka Mountains, the Yellowstone River drainage, the ranching towns of Sweet Grass County — provides the setting for most of his Montana fiction.