Papa's Son

By Martha Duffy

NINETY-TWO IN THE SHADE

by THOMAS McGUANE

197 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

$6.95.

In many ways, Thomas McGuane is a throwback. Though he is just 33, his outlook comes from a time before black humor, the roman nouveau, and the new journalism, when writers and readers believed that fiction was the ideal way to capture the essence of experience. In some respects, McGuane is a literary descendant of Hemingway. Both men are rigorous stylists; for both, reality emerges from careful, linear detail. It has been some time since a writer has acknowledged, as McGuane does, having been influenced by anything of Hemingway's except Death in the Afternoon. Possibly a change of fashion is at hand.

McGuane's own trademark is the monstrous practical joke that is at the center of all his books. In The Sporting Club, a demonic hoax-artist contrived to destroy an exclusive hunt club in northern Michigan. The Bushwhacked Piano contained a lunatic scheme to cash in on antipesticide sentiment by selling tall towers stocked with insect-eating bats.

In Ninety-Two in the Shade, the joke is simpler and more deadly. After a wretched drug trip, young Tom Skelton goes home to Key West and decides to break in as a professional fishing guide. He copies the angling style of an old outlaw named Nichol Dance, who was run out of Kentucky for killing a man and who can tell where the permit will run long before the fish appear--at least when he is not too drunk to speak. One day he offers Skelton his bookings; he has killed another man, he claims, and will soon be in prison. When the younger man finds out that all this is only a casual redneck ruse, he sets fire to Dance's skiff. There is only one riposte to that act of war: Dance promises Skelton a speedy death if he ever tries to guide in the Keys. Skelton orders himself a skiff.

Samuel Johnson once remarked that there is nothing like waiting to be hanged to sharpen a man's faculties. So it is with Skelton from the moment a last horizon is penciled in a few inches from his nose. He designs the skiff along the firm specifications of his daydreams. He begins to fall in love with his girl. Most of all, he seeks links between himself, his father, and his grandfather, an energetic old crook of limit less cynicism, "bilking everyone and being down right fatherly about it." His preference in sexual foreplay is to jump around on a trampoline with his well-rounded middle-aged mistress.

By contrast, Skelton's father is literally a basket case, who seldom stirs from a canopy festooned with mosquito netting. But hearing of Dance's threat, he lurches into unaccustomed activity. Perhaps the book's best scene is a tender confrontation between father and son, the father knowing the son's moral course the way the guides know the bonefishing tides, and being equally helpless to shift it.

Young Skelton is as concerned as Hemingway was with "a good death," but he is contemporary in knowing that there is no such thing. "There are no tremendous deaths any more. The pope, the president, the commissar all come to it like cigarette butts dropped to the sidewalk." Still, he clings to a notion of a powerful grace born of desperation, and goes off to a rendezvous with Dance where they both know the fish will be running.

A plot that is little more than a simple, formal dance of death must be well served in the telling. McGuane brings powers of concentration to writing that recall Camus as much as Hemingway. Unlike Camus, McGuane is no thinker, but his Key West is as palpable as the Algiers of The Stranger. His prose shimmers like heat: "Thunderous light fills the city and everyone moves in stately flotation." Ninety-Two in the Shade is the best book yet of a very strong young writer. . Martha Duffy

It was only last year that Tom McGuane gave up for good on being a cowboy. A COWBOY'S WORK IS NEVER DONE is still neatly printed on the dashboard of his old pickup truck. That is his Montana persona. In the winter he lives in Key West and thinks of becoming a fishing guide if he goes broke.

McGuane is of course a writer, full time, serious and solvent. The daydreams of alternate occupations are part of his openly boyish nature. He has just discovered mortality, for instance. Didn't know it was there before. "I'm like a kid with a strangely ugly new toy. I used to think writers who bore in on it were morbid. Now I think of certain people dying--my wife, my dog, my friends--and it's perfectly unbearable."

McGuane has been married for eleven years to a tiny, pretty girl who is a direct descendant of Davy Crockett. They have a six-year old son, Thomas IV. Whether on their 40-acre ranch outside Livingston, Mont., or in Key West, the McGuanes are a refuge for a shifting population of the lonely, itinerant or freaked out. "We're everyone's straight friend," he says. "I love the fact that my household is beautifully run. But I need chaos too, so I live near the ocean or the wilderness. I have a mortal fear of being housebroken."

The McGuane house contrives to be orderly and chaotic at once. Many writers--Richard Brautigan, William Eastlake, Jim Harrison--show up at one time or other. Last summer they were 28 strong in Montana until someone complimented Tom on his "commune." He cleared the place out. Unsurprisingly, he can work anywhere and enjoy it. "I've made writers I know admit two things: how much they really love writing and what they owe Hemingway. I laugh when I hear one more guy say he owes everything to Ezra Pound." McGuane reveres genius. He winces when recalling that a friend told him that Faulkner had bad taste in furniture.

Born and raised in Michigan, where his father manufactures auto parts, McGuane cannot remember a time when he did not want to write. At ten he collaborated on a novel with the boy next door until they got into a fistfight over the description of a sunset. Now his favorite writers include Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck ("Someone else no one will admit was any good") plus Turgenev, Chekhov and Knut Hamsun. The depth of McGuane's reading can be seen in the sophistication of his prose. "I have been sloppy in my approach to being an artist," he says, "but one thing I will say for myself: I read like a son-of-a-bitch."

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