Skelton thought about the electrical drill and how it could take the hole of the light socket and modify it to another; hole power; perhaps ridiculous but close to his father and his mysteries. He though of the vultures you could see circling a pit (usually filled with garbage but never mind that); or how during the eclipse of the sun in 1970, running to the Snipe Keys, he had stopped the skiff when the light started to go out, looked up as proscribed by radio news broadcasts to see half a thousand seabirds circling a black hole in the sky. It was the kind of hole people could create, throwing each other into shadow. But there was something there to be considered, the radios everywhere telling you not to look, the vultures over the garbage pit, the news broadcasts of 1970 reflecting another eclipse and a quarter of a billion people staring into the black hole in the sky. And in his own fractional quadrant of the world, Skelton looking to the whirling seabirds and their black pivot and then across the still, mercurial sea darkening as though oxydized by this lunar tropism. The power of nothing. (p. 172)Yes, if Young Gun McGuane hadn't been so eager to let everyone know Who the Fuck He Was, he likely could have made a much more believable Pynchposter than Jay Dee. 92 is deliciously overwritten in the kind of crazed comic delirium that's almost better for the initial grate it inflicts: the similes come in threes, the characters in too-visible brittle shells of themselves, liable to be cracked by a dislodged branch from the ragged family tree or an errant skiff paddle, whichever finds itself brilliantly pun-turned first. The copy I got from Goodwill has sand wedged into what appears to be a strip of fly paper on the first page, and is marred by a mean cover-curve that managed to survive seven months under eight hardbacks and a ten-pound dumb-bell. Beautiful.
Wild horses belonged to that company of things that could not have made Skelton bring these things together on purpose, nor any collaboration of all the tea in China and months of Sundays. On days of more than twenty-knot wind, the foam lines began to build on the ocean and any bird that so much as raised its wings got the kind of scudding trip before superior force that Skelton felt himself now getting, as these clusters formed and foolish lives like his fathers began to break up. Something was afoot.Truthfully, I don't quite know what to make of this book. Every time I thought it was going in one direction, it went in a different one. Every time I thought something was going to happen, it didn't. And then, when in the last two pages something finally did happen, I barely noticed it. It's as thought Thomas McGuane is constantly reaching for something that is constantly just out of his grasp, that sits there mocking him with its unobtainability. Instead, he produces a self-mocking, bizarre, reductionist view, in which eternal misery and damnation is ignored simply by looking at things slightly differently - by distracting yourself with something more satisfying in the immediate present.
What do You think about Ninety-two In The Shade (1995)?
This is an inane story, set deep in the drug and alcohol-induced slime that apparently was all there was to Key West in decades thankfully long past. The plot is not interesting, the vulgarity is disgusting, there are many irrelevant asides, the ending is not fulfilling. Yet all of it is beautifully, sometimes breathtakingly, written, a single redeeming virtue that makes the book worth reading, if you put aside its faults, slow down, and savor it. An example (p. 23) ..."Then too you could remember when you had been below Key West to the Marquesas on a cool winter day when the horsetails were on a rising barometer sky and the radiant drop curtain of fuchsia light stood on edge from the Gulf Stream. And when he ran back across the Boca Grande channel into the lakes and then toward Cortrell to miss the finger banks he knew he would raise Key West on the soft pencil-edge of sea and sky. Then the city would seem like a white folding ruler, in sections; and the frame houses always lifted slowly, painted and wooden, from the sullen contours of the submarine base."
—Lewis Weinstein
McGuane is a stream of consciousness guy.This is his best work.I think he's wrapped up in it, less of the urgent prattling normally attached to this style and instead enriched it with more realistic untamed and stuttering mind states.I thought this book was about knowing something terrible and not wanting it to be about you but your drastic reactions only prove the opposite,and you get caught in a loop falling closer and closer in to its dark core with a widening set of scars that spell out all of your fears.
—Jesse
I emailed my favorite writer from Rolling Stone and particularly praised his penchant for oddly long and detailed list-like sentences; he thanked me but said he'd cribbed the idea from this book. So the stylized writing is both what drew me to this book and what sticks with me afterwards:"The fuselage, a remnant of a crash-landed navy reconnaissance plane, rested logically on a concrete form and had by now in the quick tropical growing seasons become impressively laced with strangler fig (a plant whose power was now slowly buckling the riveted aluminum panels), bougainvillea, Confederate star jasmine, and a delicate form of trumpeter vine whose blue translucent blossoms cascaded around the compression-sealed aerodynamic doorway." (p. 23-24)Akin to an impressionistic painting, transmission of a specific form and feeling is more salient here than capturing flat realism. The plot -- revolving around a fishing boat guide, the threat upon his life from a rival, and his off-beat family tree -- seems important primarily for its absurdity. Existential dread and mordant humor pervade, making the book feel like "Waiting for Godot" if it had been written by Hunter S.
—Speeda
