Novelist Thomas McGuane got caught in the crossfire of the New Yorker turf war between Roger Angel and Gordon Lish. Up until the late seventies McGuane’s novels “The Sporting Club” and “Bushwhacked Piano” had created a sensation. McGuane captured a counterculture zeitgeist tapped by Donald Barthelme and Sam Shepard. McGuane was reviewed everywhere as the next big thing of American letters. Praise was showered on his work from the most prestigious publications - dozens of excellent reviews then the big shift at The New Yorker from Donald Barthelme’s epiphanies of the absurd to stark minimal realism and WHAM! McGuane’s next novel, Panama, the finest of all of his novels and perhaps THE great American novel, gets thrashed. He is knocked from his high wire by the spreading New Yorker chill that set the realist / minimalist tune across the American literary landscape. Raymond Carver was used as a weapon by Gish who was battling Angel in the captain’s tower. Any one of a dozen writers may have served his purpose. Carver’s shyness and drinking problem must have made him appear pliable. Annoying to see a great writer like Thomas McGuane get burned in the chaos of this New York paradigm juke.