 With the exception of positive reviews in "The New Yorker" and "The Village Voice", the novel was mercilessly panned by critics as self-absorbed and a testament to wasted literary talent – notwithstanding McGuane's protests that he considered it his best novel.An ongoing struggle has ensued between McGuane and his reviewers concerning their expectations for his fiction, and their sense of how much McGuane's celebrity was intruding upon his work.The upheaval of the period concluded with the deaths of McGuane's father, mother, and sister in the span of 30 months.