Word: panama
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...PANAMA by Thomas McGuane Farrar, Straus & Giroux 175 pages...
Perhaps celebrity is bad for the talent. In any case, Panama is fairly minor McGuane. In his tale, Chester Hunnicutt Pomeroy is an overnight American superstar rapidly descending to the white-dwarf stage. His act, something along the lines of Alice Cooper's, only more so, included a routine in which he crawled out of an elephant's behind and dueled with a baseball pitching machine. Now, his brainpan made porous by drugs, Pomeroy has withdrawn to Key West, where he maniacally stalks his old love Catherine. A man with a lot less charm or interest than...
...Panama may be intended as a dithyramb of exhaustion-Pomeroy's and, grandiosely, the American culture's. But despair loses something when it is unearned and vaguely cute. The novel savors of cocaine, narcissism and a certain impenetrable smugness...
THAT IS the only mention of Panama, of Canal Zone and right-wing Southern paranoia fame, in these 175 pages, but it is the crux of the book. Chet suffers from memory loss; Catherine hires a private detective to inform him of what he did during the day so that eventually he might get it back. Maybe, then, you can go home again--but what if you can't remember home, or what it was, like? What if you can't remember when, where, or if you were married? In a minor key, this translates into not remembering...
...perhaps Tom McGuane also suffers from memory loss--he has forgotten the Aristotelian Florida of 92 in the Shade, forsaken it for the Caribbean syndicalism of Panama. As Geoffrey Wolfe (one of our better book critics) pointed out in his review in New Times, this book suffers from many things, but most of all it suffers from the first person. But that first person telling also makes me think there is more to Panama than one might first notice: 92 in the Shade was a story of heat, moving at a seemingly languid pace, while Panama, underneath the cool cocaine...