Peter Boody's Blog: Inside Out: a not-so-smalltown editor's life - Posts Tagged "tom-mcguane"

Mile Marker Zero by William McKeen

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I'm a Key West fan and must admit I'm one of those bourgeois touristy people that have allowed the developer and corporate types to turn Key West into a Disneyland version of its former dirty, stinking tropical-trash self. So despite my guilt, and my personal failure to head to Key West when I was 21 to go hang at the Chart Room, I really enjoyed this book, which is about the 1970s in Key West, when the Chart Room crowd — including Jimmy Buffet and writer Tom McGuane — formed a kind of manly salon of late-day Hemingway wannabes.
Or maybe just jerks. Some of these guys sound kind of like real assholes*: drunk out of their minds and chauvinistic tyrants ... at least McGuane does and he becomes, essentially, the focus of the book.
McKeen doesn't find the humanity in him or the rest of them, which I assume is there somewhere. He just kind of runs through their adventures in a curiously choppy, disorganized and sometimes even repetitive way. (* Jimmy B excepted and I doubt Tom McGuane is really an asshole either; no devoted father and fly fisherman could be.)
There are lyrical and richly moody moments in the book that stitch fragmented anecdotes, blotchy scenes and scattered moments together and the overall effect has a charm and appeal. But the writing --- or at least the organization and structure --- is peculiar if not downright bad.
The story line, for example, begins not with McGuane but a very well crafted and strong depiction of a guy I'd never heard of before, Tom Corcoran, deciding to make a life in KW after his Navy career. It was good stuff but it disappears ... only to re-emerge near the endless swan-song ending of the book, with news of the bizarre disappearance if his devoted wife and his late career as a writer, which is barely covered.
I suspect the problem is that the book is really a transcription of interview highlights stitched together with some made-to-order literary binder. It's all disguised as a book meant to be like "Philistines at the Hedgerow," an excellent example of the genre: a series of rich vignettes that each focus on a particular player on the Hamptons scene on eastern Long Island (where I live) in the 1970s or so. That book was brilliantly executed, a bestseller for Stephen Gaines and it deserved to be, with richly drawn character studies and fully realized accounts of important events in the lives and times of each subject.
This sometimes shaky imitation is a must read and even a good book for any Key West aficionado but it has serious flaws. I still give it a 4 because I did enjoy it, I'm glad McKeen wrote it and maybe he did the best anybody could with the material, which features less than heroic and maybe even less than fascinating people, at least when they were in Key West.



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