Books |
Ninety-two in the Shade
Thomas McGuane
By
Published: Feb 11, 2010
Category:
Fiction
Here’s a fun fact: Thomas McGuane is the first American novelist to adapt his book for the movies — and then direct the film.
Even more unlikely fact: Though McGuane was married to one of the stars of the film, he had an on-set affair with another actress during the production.
Back in the 1970s, that was classic McGuane good fortune and classic McGuane behavior. And that’s a good place to start an appreciation of McGuane’s third novel, Ninety-two in the Shade — because arrogant, brilliant exceptionalism runs through the writer, his book and his movie.
“Ninety-two in the Shade” was published in 1973, and for many readers who admire McGuane, it’s his best book. On the flip side, if you don’t like his style or his characters, you’re just going to hate this novel. Me, I re-read it every few years and never cease to be delighted.
The novel begins like this: Nobody knows, from sea to shining sea, why we are having all this trouble with our republic….
And right there, you know quite a lot about what you’re getting into. For this is a stoned, smart voice — and one in no hurry to dive into a story.
Just as well. The plot of this novel is as ephemeral as a cocaine high.
Thomas Skelton is young, attractive, super-smart — picture Peter Fonda, or perhaps the author. His father is a drunk out of Faulkner. The family manse in Key West also gives off the smell of the ruined South. And yet Skelton throws over graduate work in biology to repair to Key West and become a fishing guide.
He has a girlfriend in Key West. “Miranda used to do reds, crossed her sevens, and had a Leo rising.” We meet her when Skelton lets himself into her apartment: She’s making love, and asks him to wait outside until she’s finished. Afterward, he berates himself:”Why do I have to be so stupid about this? I know better than to be this way.”
That is, in this place where Hemingway once lived and wrote, Tom Skelton is trying to work out a less-than-macho kind of manhood.
This won’t be easy — the story here is set up like a western.
That’s because you don’t just get a skiff and start booking clients. Not when one of the other guides is Nichol Dance, who came to Key West after killing a stable boy in Kentucky. Dance carries a gun — hell, he is himself a gun, capable of going off at any moment. And in the matter of Thomas Skelton he couldn’t be clearer: Skelton cuts into his business, he’s going to die.
“Ninety-two in the Shade” is very much a book about honor in a dishonorable time. Poling a skiff through shallow waters in search of some of the most elusive fish around — bonefish and permit — has a rigor that Skelton can’t resist. Of course he’s going to guide. And if a death threat is the price, fine — an awareness of death sharpens your appreciation of every minute you’ve got left.
But then, McGuane’s prose style sharpens awareness all by itself. After a failed marriage, Dance takes up “drinking of the kind that is a throwing of yourself against the threshold of suicide though lacking that final will to your own ceasing.” Skelton’s mother weeps: “a steady, streaming exhaustion with men who had become figments of their own imaginations.” And how’s this for a paragraph that occurs at 7:30 AM, as Miranda gets dressed to teach seventh-grade geography:
Skelton the spy: the gloom of women dressing. The swell of buttons where they glide into back, vanishing under swoop of Indian cotton blouse. Turn for sleepy smile. Demiglobes of breast in blouse, pale half of moon belly, gone under the advance of mother-of-pearl buttons. It is summer in Russia; I am preparing for a mortal duel in a swoon of girls. Miranda the pale<
As I say, you love that richly over-the-top Southern writing, or you find it as repellent as fruit gone bad. I find it funny. But then, I find the rich couple from Rumson, Connecticut who argue on Skelton’s boat and drink Gibsons out of their thermos under a hot sun funny. And, really, is there anything funnier than a guy planting the flag of manhood where he knows he’s gonna get a fight?
1973. The Vietnam War rolling on, unstoppable. Nixon in the White House. Cocaine replacing marijuana as the hip drug of choice. McGuane mentions none of that — when you get to Key West, the civilized world is far in the background — but you can feel that corrosion in the heart of the Republic. And, against that background, you can almost understand Thomas Skelton. Hell, you can almost identify with him.
