Ninety-two in the Shade

by Thomas McGuane

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD NOMINEE • A stunning novel about a deadly rivalry in Key West from the acclaimed author of Cloudbursts . McGuane has constructed a novel with the impetus of a thriller and the heartbroken humor that is his distinct contribution to American prose.

Tiring of the company of junkies and burn-outs, Thomas Skelton goes home to Key West to take up a more wholesome life. But things fester in America's utter South. And Skelton's plans to become a skiff guide in the shining blue subtropical waters place him on a collision course with Nichol Dance, who has risen to the crest of the profession by dint of infallible instincts and a reputation for homicide.

"Thomas McGuane makes the page, the paragraph, the sentence itself a record of continuous imaginative activity.... He is an important as well as a brilliant novelist." — The New York Times Book Review

Genres: Fiction, Novels, Humor, Classics, Literary Fiction, Literature, Noir

197 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1973

About the author

Thomas Francis McGuane III is an American writer. His work includes ten novels, short fiction and screenplays, as well as three collections of essays devoted to his life in the outdoors. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, National Cutting Horse Association Members Hall of Fame and the Fly-Fishing Hall of Fame.

McGuane's early novels were noted for a comic appreciation for the irrational core of many human endeavors, multiple takes on the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s. His later writing reflected an increasing devotion to family relationships and relationships with the natural world in the changing American West, primarily Montana, where he has made his home since 1968, and where his last five novels and many of his essays are set. He has three children, Annie, Maggie and Thomas.

Reviews

[Jayakrishnan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I watched a film based on this book around 10 years ago. It was on a video CD without subtitles. I did not understand all of it. But I thought it was really charming. I liked the ensemble cast and the amazing background score. I kept postponing reading the book due to sheer laziness but ordered it on Book-finder recently.

The book is set in the idyllic Key West. Mcguane (who also directed the movie) creates these great eccentric characters who have no real future. There is Tom Skelton who was a druggie and is now trying to move in on the guiding business of two regular skiff guides. This sets off a potentially murderous rivalry between him and the alcoholic and suicidal Nicol Dance. Carter, another guide plays them against each other even as he struggles with the promiscuity of his ex-cheerleader wife. Skelton's family is also quite dysfunctional with his rich, corrupt and powerful grandfather constantly bullying his bed-ridden father. There is even a character named Myron Moorhen!

Mcguane's syntax is tough. I had to reread many sentences and I gave up on some of them because I did not know what he was going on about. The sentences are dense and long, often containing many obscure words. But the dialogs and the eccentric characters and their motivations were hilarious. There are also great descriptions of the Key West - especially the part where Skelton saves a fish that is tethered to the hook of a customer he dislikes. All of these kept me going.

It is not an easy book to read. A couple of dialogs from the book that stuck with me:

"Generation after generation, the blind leading the blind. It gives them something to do."

"The captain-or guide-experienced a sudden loss of interest-or ambition-and flaked out without warning".

[A.J. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thomas Skelton leaves behind a life of drugs and debauchery, not to mention his studies, and returns home to Key West. He decides to become a flats guide, because it's only while out on the flats that he feels whole. But guiding is a competitive business. And Nichol Dance, an established guide, makes it clear that Skelton isn't welcome.

92 in the Shade is the high-water mark of McGuane's prose style. He writes with effortless flash, with a precise diction that is trademark. He slides from formal sentences and high diction into colloquialisms, shifts from present tense to past and back, and subtly confuses the narrative point of view, all of it smoothly and effortlessly. Read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which has Hunter Thompson at his best, and then read 92 in the Shade: Thompson doesn't stand a chance in that race. McGuane has an extra gear.

Still, this novel is not without fault. McGuane's early novels all suffer from a certain smart-assed tone, perhaps the arrogance of youth combined with the age. This dooms the Sporting Club, although 92 in the Shade overcomes it through the sheer quality of the writing.

Unmistakably McGuane's best novel.

[Lewis Weinstein · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an inane story, set deep in the drug and alcohol-induced slime that apparently was all there was to Key West in decades thankfully long past. The plot is not interesting, the vulgarity is disgusting, there are many irrelevant asides, the ending is not fulfilling. Yet all of it is beautifully, sometimes breathtakingly, written, a single redeeming virtue that makes the book worth reading, if you put aside its faults, slow down, and savor it.

An example (p. 23) ...

"Then too you could remember when you had been below Key West to the Marquesas on a cool winter day when the horsetails were on a rising barometer sky and the radiant drop curtain of fuchsia light stood on edge from the Gulf Stream. And when he ran back across the Boca Grande channel into the lakes and then toward Cortrell to miss the finger banks he knew he would raise Key West on the soft pencil-edge of sea and sky. Then the city would seem like a white folding ruler, in sections; and the frame houses always lifted slowly, painted and wooden, from the sullen contours of the submarine base."

[Tom Vater · Rating 5 out of 5]

A sane man thinking of death, however casually, should immediately visit a girl whether in quest of information, affinities, or carnal gratification, It’s a case of any port in a storm, mortality being, in any case, an omnipresent hurricane.

Thomas Skelton is your classic American hero, as well as a bit of a screw-up and a product of the 1960s counter-culture. He’s a habitual drug taker engaged in his very own race to the bottom, lost in Cocaine Carolina, wandering empty highways, expecting to be declared insane any minute, like any truly lucid human being. As Bukowski, a lesser writer perhaps, though one who navigates similar waters, once said, Some people never go crazy, What truly horrible lives they must live.

But Skelton is not crazy, he’s merely a romantic in a hostile world gone bad. In a silent powder daze, the main protagonist of Thomas McGuane’s exceptional novel 92 in the Shade (1972) – one of the most literary Noir novels I have ever had the pleasure to read, and immediately re-read, and quoted to my friends at length – sets off home from Nowheresville USA to the Everglades, the setting of many brooding and dark tales about the underbelly of the American dream.

Skelton, intent on giving the drugs and his aimless wanderings a break, is chasing his own dream, to become a fishing guide. Once home, he attempts to transform himself from jaded drifter to young, but highly accomplished punk muscling in on the turf of an older guide, a veritable and brutal veteran of the seas named Nichol Dance who once killed a man in cold blood. Skelton moves into the fuselage of an old plane and reconnects to his dysfunctional family – his eccentric father who once ran a whorehouse and now pretends to be bed-ridden, his grandfather who cheated his way to the top of the economic pile in the state and his girlfriend Miranda with whom he shares some of the best-written sex encounters I have come across.

Invariably, Dance is determined to kill the young punk and Skelton has a fatalistic streak that soon has him back in his own struggle to blow his mind out. As I said, Skelton is the ultimate romantic, the man nothing and no one can save because his sense of destiny as well as that of his country is unshakable. Just as unshakable as Dance’s dislike of newcomers. The story can only really proceed in one direction – right down to the wire.

McGuane is a great counterculture writer. He also authored Missouri Breaks, a strange and wonderful Western starring Jack Nicholson and Marlon Brando. Prior to his stint in Hollywood, McGuane wrote a couple of other novels in the same vein as 92 in the Shade. He also authored several books on horses and fishing and owns a ranch and this appears to lend a quiet poetry to the dark proceedings. Jim Thompson meets Peter Matthiessen and Cormack McCarthy for a conference on the ecological and spiritual death of America. And then after a hundred and fifty dense but all too short pages, it’s all over, the last existential battles have been fought and lost and we are left with a terrible feeling of emptiness and futility. We have fallen in love, and almost in the same breath, we come to the end of an intense and brief moment in time – created by words and characters. And yet… as we slowly float away, invested to the brim with a strange sense of uncalled for purity and joy, we are lucid and clear about the terrible path a truly determined man or woman (though ‘macho’ McGuane speaks mostly of men) must take. We have been told something worthwhile if not altogether palatable in the most gentle and beautiful way . Our sense of narrative loss is offset by perfect form.

McGuane tells us that, Life looked straight in the eye was insupportable, as everyone knew by instinct. The great trick, contrary to the consensus of philosophy, is to avoid looking it straight in the eye. Everything askance and it all shines on.

Indeed. The pain of Skelton’s dreams and his fatalistic and doomed journey across the coral reefs of the Everglades are elevated to great moments of unassailable life force, and of incredible literary power – in McGuane’s world, every word sits in its rightful place and shines on even when looked at directly. Some comfort.

Read more of my reviews of Noir and Pulp at hhtp://thedevilsroad.com

[Eric Cecil · Rating 2 out of 5]

The worst book I've read in years. Same way I feel about an author like Pynchon: He doesn't write about people, and the characters are unbelievable but still somehow not at all intriguing. Get the sense that I'm supposed to be impressed by the glib tone and the attempts at dimestore philosophy in the mouths of its actors -- because that's what they are -- but instead I'm simply left wondering how a writer can string together such wordy and pointlessly diffuse sentences without any sense of poetry, let alone any idea of what it means to tell a good story.

[Craig Pittman · Rating 3 out of 5]

When this book first appeared in 1973, it must have seemed like a revelation to readers. Books from Kirt Vonnegut and Tom Robbins took an approach to fiction much different from their forebears, and this, the third novel by Thomas McGuane, must have seemed the same.

Reading it now, I feel like I missed a big party.

His hero, Tom Skelton, is a brilliant screw-up and the son of a brilliant screw-up. He's living in Key West, in an old airplane fuselage that he has adapted into a house, next door to a flophouse where a former sergeant dirlls the alcoholics in military formation. His girlfriend, a comely schoolteacher named Miranda, is introduced while she's having sex with an old boyfriend, but later has sex with Skelton repeatedly -- seven times in one 8-hour period. His father is hiding from the world inside a sick bed draped in mosquito netting, from which he curses his own father and plays the violin. Skelton's grandfather, a crooked politico, is havnng an odd affair with his married assistant, including bouncing with her on a trampoline before they have sex.

The plot, such as it is, involves Skelton deciding he wants to be a Keys fishing guide. He's good at reading the tides and finding fish. With his grandfather's financial backing, he gets a boat built to his specificiatons. Meanwhile, though, the suicidal guide Nichol Dance warns him off. If you start guiding, he says, I will shoot you dead. Dance has killed a man before, and he has a gun, so it's no idle threat. A second old guide, Carter, seems inclined to egg on the conflict rather than put it down. He and Dance pull an elaborate prank on Skelton that goes badly awry and sets things down the road to the inevitable confrontation.

Although this is a short book, McGuane seems in no hurry to get the plot rolling. There are numerous side plots involving Carter's disatisfied wife and so forth, and he slows down to make passing observations about America, consumerism, etc. There are also plenty of beautiful lines about the Keys and its natural splendor, which I think is what people treasure most about this book. Those are certainly the parts I enjoyed the most. I amost wish he'd written a book about what it's like fishing in the Keys, and left the pistol play for the pulp fiction writers. I think it would have been a much more enduring work.

[Georganne · Rating 1 out of 5]

A difficult read and ultimately not worth the time spent. That said, I liked the Gallatin Canyon stories, and as this was reported to be a another good one by McGuane I read it. The tangents, the many words I had to look up, the existential angst of the characters, the insider references to Key West life (I've lived in FL almost 30 yrs but didn't have a clue) it was all just too much. Another reviewer said 'written on drugs', that seems about right.

[Nicholas Gordon · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is probably a good example of what is sometimes called a ‘literary genre novel’. Plot-wise there is a stock baddie whose proclivity for violence is meant to supply narrative tension; Language-wise there are a lot of superfluous big words and abstract riffs utterly unrelated to the so-called action at hand.

The greatly-named Nichol Dance is the novel’s resident nutjob, as well as, importantly, a successful local Key West skiff guide. (A recent cycling trip to the Keys spurred me to pick this book up, though the unforgettable title has been with me for years). Dance is intent on maintaining his customer base by remaining the primary skiff guide in town. To that end he’s more than willing to euphemistically ‘weed out’ any and all competition. This means—or in the novel’s universe it’s supposed to anyway—that the newly returned to town local Thomas Skelton should fear for his life as he buys a new skiff and prepares to become a local guide.

This dramatic crux never felt very real to me, it never lent the proceedings the requisite menace that a character like Dance is designed to lend (and which made the ending even more preposterous). I did not find the wordy riffs—too many of which are wacky, semi-coherent, semi-lyrical—all that stimulating. And while some of the dialogue sings, a lot of it is jargon-heavy on boating mechanics and technique, a subject that does not, er, float my boat, if you will.

I did appreciate McGuane’s bluntly stated intention—and ability—to conjure up ‘an exquisite synthesis of spirit and place.’ He’s clearly very intrigued by the Keys and gives a granular, tactile rendering of it.

There are some terrific descriptions to be found here: a ‘basilisk drunk’; ‘fist to jaw with the sound of flounder on marble; ‘the night seemed ruptured on a gloating moon’; ‘Californians with rakish sideburns move with cosmopolitan aplomb’. There’s the bizarrely indelible description of a vagina (then sex) - ‘a hirsute horizon surmounting a liquid slot: geronimo!’ Prolonged drug use is ‘A little like real flu combined with bad nerves and extreme old age.’ (accurate, that!); and finally, a brilliantly dispassionate assessment on the ultimate meaningless disposability of our lives, as our deaths amount to no more than ‘cigarette butts dropped to the sidewalk from the fingers of a pedestrian hurrying on toward some cloudy appointment.’

[Steven · Rating 3 out of 5]

As a former Key West resident and book store worker, this book was recommended to me countless times, and the fact that I hadn't read was often regarded as some sort of island blasphemy. So, now that I've been away from this locale for six months, I decided to revisit it through this classic novel, hoping the veil of nostalgia would help propel me through what always seemed like "not my kind of book." And the veil certainly helped, as the most fascinating part of the story for me was the vivid way McGuane was able to capture the island culture and people, both native and freshwater (as transplants to the island are called). Key West is an interesting place, as its inhabitants usually place way of life over career in their priorities, and this clash with the American way is what fills most of the interior of this novel, as our protagonist, Thomas Skelton, returns home to start over as a fishing guide after a brief attempt at academia. His plans interfere with another guide's, Nichol Dance, and the tension between these two is what propels the thin plot. The rest of the book is filled with Skelton's meandering thoughts about life and death as he interacts with locals, his girlfriend and his family, all of whom disagree with his current path. I say meanders because the book is a slow read, with McGuane's obvious intellect often obscuring his insights and more often coming across as condescension. It's not until the last quarter of the novel, as parallels begin to arise between Skelton's, his father's and his grandfather's choices in life, and McGuane ratchets up the stakes between Skelton and Dance, that the book really takes off and glides into its beautiful ending.

[Janet · Rating 4 out of 5]

I always remember this as a contemporary Western, but it's actually set in Key West--a man's attempt to turn his back on cynical, corrupt, addicted, played out America to become a fishing guide... Naturally it all catches up to him. A great short novel that leads one directly from Horseman Pass By to the work of Robert Stone.

[H · Rating 4 out of 5]

As some zany mix of Jim Harrison everyman-in-nature, Barry Hannah rambunctiousness, Don DeLillo skepticism and outward-facing preoccupation, Pynchon silliness (see Skelton's father's insane two-page rant about legacy toward the book's end), Brautigan defamiliarization ("The shadows lay this way and that, the way a tide will carry on a particularly shaped bottom, bulging and deepening and only holding fish in specific places. Or the way six grandmothers will fall when simultaneously struck by lightning."), McGuane's novel is a simple story wrapped in a showy package.

Ultimately, it's a Shakespearean-level showdown between two men over skiff guiding in Key West, but really what's at stake (and what the two men are fighting over) is who will stick to his word. Over the book's slim 200 pages, the main narrative question is: will Tom Skelton get shot by Nichol Dance for becoming a skiff guide, which Nichol Dance told him not to do. That plot question could be answered in the length of a short story, but here McGuane extends it with a series of wild set-pieces, including: a boat explosion, a woman exploding a glass while her lover suds her butt with a soapy mop, a father and son taking mushrooms and going into blimp factory to inhale helium from the tubes, not to mention multiple asides on mortality and life's meaninglessness. It's a shaggy dog story, and not really explainable without going into each successive part and how they link together, but it's a lot of fun to read.

[Michael Whitaker · Rating 3 out of 5]

Honest to goodness, I thought this would be the book of my life. It's Florida, it seems wild and dangerous and whatever else. But it wasn't my book.

I didn't love it, I didn't hate the story, but I hated reading it. I was happy with the ending but also relieved that it ended.


To the best of my understanding, and only by the last couple of pages was I able to dimly see, this book is about men with ideals and how those men mostly are misfits in "the republic," specifically, consumerism and, in some sense, capitalism. That resonates with me. Deeply.

McGuane's prose does not.

Often, I was lost.

As praise goes, this reminded me a little of Harry Crews. Floridian misfits. Flawed people. A propensity toward violence and absurdity, a lot like humanity. As a criticism, however, it was like a pretentious, high-minded Harry Crews. If Harry Crews wanted to impress you, to wow you over and over with language that was electric and references to just about anything to make you feel dull and small and dim. Basically, not Harry Crews. I just wish this had been written more clearly, more than anything. I don't like being lost and, to compare to Skelton, McGuane was not much of a guide here. He brought a fancy boat, but didn't bring me to a fish.

[James · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was intrigued by this novel because some of my counter parts in the fishing world love it. Being born and raised in Florida, having spent a great deal of my childhood down in the Keys, and being an avid fisherman (almost charter captain); I thought for sure I would love this story. But I didn't.
McGuane shows he is a craftsman of metaphors and prose. But I found the story itself kind of flat and the characters lacking emotion. Everything was just it will be what it will be. The story often goes off on tangents and I'm not sure if this done for affect, but it makes following the story somewhat difficult at times.
The story does give you a glimpse into old Florida and the characters that make it unique and for that is worth the read, but don't expect to be on the edge of your seat.

[Gabriel Congdon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Yowie-Mowie!

What a read!
This is one of those books where every sentence is amazing and every line of dialog is hilarious. Zabadaba! Humor of Robbins, visuals of Updike, verbosity of Pynchon.
I'm surprised McGuane isn't bigger then he is. Maybe he's big. What do I know?

I know this book sure ruined my Ulysses while I had it.

Do yourself a favor and once done, ring me up and say "Hot damn, Gabey-Baby, you weren't whistling Dixie when you asked me to name that tune."

[Bob Landry · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've now read 2 books by this author, this was the first and, so far, the most difficult. It was as though the author had a long, ongoing, detailed dream, and decided to put it down on paper. It was a struggle but it was well worth the effort. If you like neat, happy endings, you won't like this book.

[Joe Starnes · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read this in a day-and-a-half on the beach in Mexico circa 2005; a great story set in Key West told in an awesome voice that was unique but also reminded me of a wild combination of Cormac McCarthy and Carl Hiaasen.

[Jamie · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ten years ago, I probably could have gotten into this. Now it’s just a tiring amount of writing with not enough story to keep me going.

[Wes Blake · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’d put the last 50 pages of this book up against 50 pages from any other. Powerful and immediate.

[Randall Green · Rating 1 out of 5]

I've always known Thomas McGuane was an acquired taste, but didn't realize his target audience was schizophrenics and sociopaths. McGuane suffers from his own cleverness in stringing nouns and verbs together, creating convoluted sentences of no meaning. I'm guessing editors at the time this was originally published were themselves in the thrall of the stream of consciousness style popularized by Faulkner, but this is a poor attempt at imitation. There are no likable characters here, and both the protagonist and antagonist are infuriatingly unable to change course, even though they are both aware what the outcome will be and embrace it like long separated lovers. If McGuane's point was to point out the intransigence and stupidity of the male animal, he succeeded.

[Ryan Dyck · Rating 1 out of 5]

Unreadable

[John Cagle · Rating 4 out of 5]

I tried to hate this book but somehow, I couldn't. And that has made all the difference.

[George Soule · Rating 3 out of 5]

For so long, I’ve be meaning to read Thomas McGuane. He’s lauded as a genius, and “Ninety-two” was shortlisted for the National Book Award. So, expectations were sky high. Then why was I so disappointed? The plot, such as it was, is about a group of unsavory fishing guides and their petty grievances and misadventures in the pre-touristy Key West of the early 1970s. The story never really materializes in any compelling fashion. Rather, we follow Tom Skelton as he meanders around the island getting in and out of trouble. Thomas McGuane’s effort goes into crafting beautifully descriptive sentences, complete with words that beg for an Oxford Annotated Dictionary. His writing is high-brow, literary stuff. You almost get the impression he congratulates himself after each beautifully wrought sentence. But string all these exquisite sentences together and you don’t get much of a story at all. And the dialogue attributed to the rough-around-the-edges drifters and grifters is the sort of stuff that you’d hear in a graduate seminar, not on the mean streets of Key West. So, read this book if you’re in love with beautiful writing, but don’t care much about plot and character development.

[alex valdes · Rating 3 out of 5]

this one's a hard sell. mcguane's prose here is not very welcoming - deeply enmeshed in impenetrable fisherman's jargon specific to the florida keys without any explanations for those unfamiliar. his characters, similarly, all exemplify a very distinct breed of Florida Man, a rogue gallery of fucked-up warren oates types exhibiting varying shades of sun-baked, boozed-up, contentious, trigger-happy, sea-faring amorality and subtropical decay. it's not for everyone! but as someone who has spent plenty of time in this unique little haven/cesspool, i found plenty to enjoy, although mcguane is so prone to drugged-out nautical rambling long stretches feel like you're waist deep in a thicket of mangrove roots, corona bottles and wahoo carcasses. read this if you want to experience that

[Norman Van Aken · Rating 4 out of 5]

I returned to live in Key West in the very year another resident of Key West released this book. I originally arrived to the last island out of America in ’71 and fell under it’s spell. It was like falling in love with a woman. But I couldn’t afford to stay. I tried again in ’72 but I’d arrived with a girl that broke my heart not long after. I don’t blame her now. I was all over the place emotionally and was an economic ruin. But things changed and I learned a trade over the late fall and early spring of ’72-’72. I had become a short order cook… The opening sentence of this book cracked me up. I recognized the young man’s confusion but i was making my way out of that forest thanks to the kitchen circus I was becoming more enthralled with despite the low pay, punishing heat and brutal hours.

[Clayton Steward · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really fascinating writing that has a very noticeable ebb and flow between eloquent writing and sentences you would hear at the grungiest dive bar in Key West. It was a bit of a challenge to read but I was engaged. Sometimes it’s jarring when we jump around to different characters and scenes, but I think that was part of the fun. It paints a picture of the time period in Key West in a romantic but raw way. And the characters are all great in their weird ways.

I only picked up this book cause I watched “All that is sacred” which is a short doc about the author and his friends (Jimmy Buffett, etc) in Key West at the time he would’ve been writing books like this one. For sure recommend watching that before or after you read the book to add some context.

[Kyler McNew · Rating 3 out of 5]

If you like clever, cynical commentary on American culture, witty characters, and mastery of the English language, you’ll probably love this book. If, like me, you think “Tarpon fishing and a righteous sportsman’s feud, that’s right up my alley!” you will probably be left thinking “WTF is going on.” every few pages.
Averaged to 3 stars- 2 stars for the drudgery of most of it, 4 stars for the plot and the humor and parts I could understand. Really I just don’t think I’m smart enough to fully enjoy it, but glad to have read it.

[Anthony · Rating 3 out of 5]

I do love it when the glorious losers burn-out like dud sunsets, and in 92 in the shade McGuane does a lot - too much, really - with his askance oblong and gymnastic sentences, which can be very funny when in an observational mode, and very 'is this shit on my shoes' when dealing with cultural criticism. Cut it by 50 pages and it would be perfectly imperfect.

[JG (Introverted Reader) · Rating 1 out of 5]

Badly dated. I couldn't follow all the '70s slang and convoluted sentence constructs. I think it was supposed to be some sort of absurd comedic observation about futility and death so I kept comparing it unfavorably to Catch-22.

[Nick Moran · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sparkling! Pay attention to the shadows and the light.

[Josh Broussard · Rating 2 out of 5]

I am a big fan of McGuane's short stories, but this book was like it was written by another author. The pretentious dialogue and the high rhetoric were enough to drive me crazy. Even if I did end up understanding what was happening, which was rare, it was still not very good. That being said, the opening and the ending were really good, but not good enough for me to go up one more star. If you want good stuff from mcguane, I'd try gallatin canyon or crow fair.