Word: tomming
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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THERE IS desperation in this compact novel, and madness too. Tom McGuane is 38 years old now--Panama lunges and spouts like Hero's engine and reads as if the author does not intend to see 40. Chester (Chet) Hunnicut Pomeroy is the scion of an old Key West shipbuilding family, but Chet has rejected all that for fleeting fame in the three-chord world of rock and roll. Or something larger than that: A Mick Jagger-like figure with an equal part of Maharaji Ji and Keith Richard's bad teeth thrown in, he somehow got elevated into...
...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...
...STRANGE little book, greatly flawed but tantalizingly good-groups of brilliant paragraphs sandwiched around prose that runs annoyingly flat. Tom McGuane jumped the stakes on himself; the epigram that begins the book is "The best epitaph a man can gain is to have accomplished daring deeds of valor against the enmity of fiends during his lifetime." Worthy sentiments, but that hardly makes the comic Nylon Pindar a fiend. More a shitsucker, in Chet's phrase, more Runyonesque. The Caribbean syndicalist novel is not an art form of the future; after all, Hero's engine never really ran anything; it just...
...gifted German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder hired Playwright Tom Stoppard, author of that Nabokovian whimsy Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, to adapt Despair for the screen. Except for one grave lapse, he has done so effectively and with suitable reverence, and Fassbinder has assembled a first-rate cast...
...York lost Tom Seaver, Oakland couldn't keep Reggie Jackson, but Cincinnati is determined to hold on to Pete Rose. The Reds' star third baseman is scheduled to become a free agent on Nov. 3. To keep him in town, the city planning commission has drafted an ordinance designating Rose "an historic property." If the city council passes the ruling, there cannot be any "alteration to the exterior appearance of the property," including "the number 14 on the shirt and large lettering on the posterior of the shirt spelling out the word Rose." More important, there...