Club Life With Insight And Humor, Clint Mccown Uses Country Club Situations To Explore Human Foibles And Excesses

“The Member-Guest”

By Clint McCown (Doubleday, $20)

The Member-Guest is the big event of the year, a golf tournament held at a country club where handicaps and rankings would be better assigned on the basis of social ambition and grasps on reality than on the ability to hit a ball with a wood or iron.

Although unnamed, its locale given only vague specificity, the country club in one way or another is known to all of us, whether we consider golf a noble or a silly pursuit.

This club with its manicured greens, faulty plumbing and cranky air conditioning is the venue for Clint McCown’s excellent collision of members, their guests and colleagues, as they prepare for and participate in events for which they have questionable abilities and unreasonable expectations.

The dust jacket of “The Member-Guest” calls the narrative a novel; the acknowledgments page accounts for the publication of nine of the “chapters” (of which there are 10) as short stories, two of which were winners in a major competition.

Novel or short stories? Whatever. McCown’s sense of place and character interweave to form an exquisitie narrative, most of which takes place off the golf links.

Even those moments played out on the greens or bunkers have little to do with the game itself, but involve instead a disgruntled female member cementing in the cups on a number of holes on the morning of the tournament; an upwardly mobile bicycle repairman who steals golf carts; and the club pro, desperately trying to bury some incriminating evidence in a sand trap.

With the exceptions of a young man who works in the club’s pro shop, and the club’s founding father who has memory problems, the major characters are middle-aged.

Their dreams are as fragile as, say, those of Lyle, the real estate agent, whose plans for hosting a clambake in which he will attract potential clients is dealt a severe blow by the early arrival of refrigerated clams.

Their opportunities grow more precarious, as witness Bev, married to the man who steals golf carts; she runs the club snack bar and provides extraordinary services for Ed, a runty, cigar-chewing hustler.

All of them have some gaping hole in the fabric of their practicality, and time seems to be running out for each.

At the center of this roil of hidden agenda, Rod, the club pro who never made the grade on the professional tour, is driven to greater risks and leaps of faith, not only by his libido but also by the potential for his future.

The country club life of Middle America offers excellent opportunities to parlay the foibles, weaknesses and excesses of its denizens into the stinging satire associated with Sinclair Lewis or the affectionate approach sometimes favored by John Steinbeck.

Although humor is a McCown indulgence, he is neither mean-spirited nor given to over-the-top farce.

The result is believable characters caught in moments of plausible vulnerability.

“The Member-Guest” is an inventive and compelling long-form debut.