The Bushwhacked Piano was published by Simon & Schuster in 1971 and won the Rosenthal Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Nicholas Payne is McGuane’s archetypal protagonist: brilliant, reckless, self-destructive, and possessed of a prose consciousness so heightened that it becomes a form of alienation from ordinary life.
Payne pursues Ann Fitzgerald — a girl from a wealthy Michigan family whose parents loathe him — across the American landscape. Along the way, he encounters C.J. Clovis, a con man who sells “bat towers” (structures allegedly designed to attract bats that will eat mosquitoes) to Florida municipalities. The bat towers don’t work. Nobody cares. The entire economy, McGuane implies, operates on confidence and momentum rather than utility.
The novel’s prose represents McGuane at his most extravagant — metaphors pile upon metaphors, sentences spiral into linguistic excess, and the reader is carried along by pure verbal energy. Critics compared him to Nabokov and Pynchon; McGuane acknowledged the influence of both but was writing something more physical, more rooted in landscape and the body.
Collecting The Bushwhacked Piano
First edition (Simon & Schuster, New York, 1971): Boards with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine in jacket: $100–$250
- Very good in jacket: $40–$100
Projected values (2026–2036): Strong appreciation. Widely considered McGuane’s funniest novel.
The American Picaresque
Nicholas Payne is McGuane’s great comic creation: a man of genuine intelligence and zero self-discipline who drifts through American landscapes — Michigan, Montana, Key West — leaving wreckage behind him. The novel’s set pieces (Payne’s scheme to sell bat towers, his encounters with Ann’s deranged parents, the draft-board confrontation) are among the funniest in postwar American fiction.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is McGuane’s writing style? McGuane’s prose is dense, witty, and allusive, influenced by Hemingway’s rhythms but with a manic comic energy Hemingway lacked. His sentences are precisely constructed — each word earns its place — and his metaphors draw on the natural world with the specificity of a trained outdoorsman.