Word: skeltons
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Before these two adversaries--master fishing guide Nichol Dance and encroaching novice Tom Skelton--die their beautiful deaths, McGuane unfolds the recesses of Tom Skelton's psyche. Skelton is a modern Thoreau. A refugee from prolonged drug miasmas and the turbulence of modern society, Skelton has retreated to his hometown to slow down his pace of life and get back to the core of his being, allowing just the essential eccentricities. His Walden is the ocean surrounding Key West...
Married. Red Skelton, 60, consummate TV clown whose alter egos include flap-footed Clem Kaddiddlehopper and threadbare Freddie the Freeloader; and Lothian Toland, 35, sportswoman whose father was cinematographer for Citizen Kane and Wuthering Heights; he for the third time, she for the first; in San Francisco...
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...
...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...
...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...