Panama

by Thomas McGuane

"This is the first time I've worked without a net." The speaker is Chester Pomeroy, a washed-up rock star turned casualty of illicit substances and kamikaze passion. But we may also read these words as an aesthetic statement from Chester's creator, Thomas McGuane, who has made Panama a high-wire act of extravagant emotion and steel-nerved prose.

As he haunts Key West, pestering family, threatening a potential in-law with a .38, and attempting to crucify himself on his ex's door out of sheer lovesickness, Chester emerges as the pure archetype of the McGuane hero. Out of his struggle to rejoin the human race -- and the imminent possibility that he may die trying -- McGuane has fashioned a harrowing and hilarious novel of "alligators, macadam, the sea, sticky sex, laughter, and sudden death."

"Whatever risk McGuane may have sensed in attempting [Panama], the feat proves successful. The audience is left dazzled." -- The New Yorker

Genres: Fiction, Humor, Literary Fiction, Novels, 20th Century, Literature

175 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1978

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

[Evan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm blaming my friend Tom the hoarder who generously calls himself a "collector" and whose house is an impassable dump full of flea-bitten cats for calling me at 2 am to tell me about his latest fucking rare LP acquisitions that his cats will pee on anyway and which I don't give a shit about which kept me from finishing this book at a more decent time and is forcing me to write a review that's going to be shittier than it should be because I can't write well at 3:40 am, as you are seeing. But it has to be done now, because I have parental responsibilities to attend to in the morning.

This novel, Panama, by Thomas McGuane is one of the oddest I've ever had the pleasure of encountering. Its fucked-up protagonist, Chet Pomeroy -- a prematurely dentured total washout mental case kicking around late '70s Key West -- is more a loser than I am (though not as much of one as Tom the hoarder), and because I'm feeling especially loser-ish these days it's the right book at the right time for me. Being able to make the contrast between me and Chet is uplifting. Not that I'm ashamed to be a loser. Nay, I'm proud. I mean, Donald Trump is a winner. 'Nuff said.

Chet is an ex-rock star and self-described pariah; shiftless, dissolute, coked-up, washed-up, shambling, rambling, looking at the seedier sides of Key West with a sad magical realist POV. He brandishes a five-shot Smith & Wesson, sacrificing the extra bullet for the sake of compactness. He is always magnetically drawn to trouble, regardless of the absolute certainty that his face will be the loser and the blood and dentures will go flying from it. The cops, the lawyers, the bill collectors all have it out for him, as they should.

He is the Shakespearean fool telling his own story, but unlike the Bard's loco truth-tellers Chet's veritas cannot be trusted. At the very start of the story he vows to tell the truth and thereafter is evasive, lazy and so in love of his fanciful inventions that we know he's lying most of the time. He accepts his role unquestioningly ("Like Ulysses S. Grant, it was an instance of a village crank being called by his Republic"), mainly because he doesn't know what else to do.

Visions of The Dude from the Coen Brothers' film, The Big Lebowski (written much later) come to mind.

In his quest for god knows what -- contrition, redemption, acceptance, a new start, normalcy -- there is also a girl, the love of his life -- a South Carolina beauty whose evasions of his stalkings and threats of restraining orders are decidedly half-hearted. These two have a history, as the reader shall see...

What we learn about Chet and his life comes to us in fragmented form from his disordered brain over the course of the novel. And not all of it is filled in by novel's end. Officially he is the family black sheep, an heir marooned at the end of the line of a family of once prominent shipbuilders, the last of its old money quickly dissolving up his nose. The only evidence of a family legacy -- of solidity -- is a small sailboat he built in better days, and he wants to sink that.

Along the way, there are visions of Jesse James, whom Chet insists is alive, and denials of the existence of real people who are actually alive. There is his girlfriend Catherine's bisexual companion, Marcelline, upset at having her face peed on during a one-night tryst. There is a semi-crucifixion. There is a dog that goes unnamed for seven years. There are abandoned shipyards and cigar factories and hot asphalt and seedy strip malls and decaying docks and fetid lagoons where dead loser Greyhounds from the track are dumped. The book is highly evocative of the fauna and mood of its place -- a place in sync with the lazy resignation of its protagonist.

What Panama means will not be told to you until halfway through the book.

The writing throughout is staccato and often disorienting. The dialogue is quirky and hilarious. Almost every line of this book is a gem. McGuane writes like a possessed motherfucker. As in his other novels, he tends to explore the more irresponsible realms of malehood, his characters are unsympathetic, trafficking in gamesmanship. In this one, the gamesmanship comes in the form of extreme apathy. As with The Sporting Club, he has written a novel that can be hard to like, but impossible not to admire.

At its heart, the book is a love story, a strange and poignant one.

Although this does not have the breadth and scope of McGuane's The Sporting Club, I found this to have a precision and focus that suited me more. Plus, it's damned funny.

McGuane gains serendipitous kudos by providing me with literary lusciousness on the heels of my recent partaking of sparse and uninspired writerly fare.

I'm giving this the full monty for uniqueness, plus the extra star I give myself for finding something unexpected that also happens to fucking rock.

It's 4:42 am now, and if this review sucks, I've already told you why.

[Kirk · Rating 4 out of 5]

For a long time McGuane claimed this was his favorite book---perversely, one suspects, because for a long time it was his most fiercely criticized. In fact, the book took such a critical drubbing when it appeared in 1978 that it pretty much whapped TMcG out of his "Captain Berskero" party mode and sent him back West to write with a new commitment to craft. I read this as part of a genre of Key West books for a Hemingway project I was doing, so it's hard for me to separate it from THE BUSHWACKED PIANO and NINETY-TWO IN THE SHADE. While PANAMA is an absurdist work in the mode of those two, there's also a desperation here that makes it more compelling---at least to me. If you've ever known someone who was committed to self-destruction, you've met Chet Pomeroy. There's a lot of 1970s' decadence here---coke, threesomes, violence (Chet nails his own hand to a lover's door at one point)---all described in that weird, is-this-really-happening? Jimmy Carter-era of ennui and irreality. My copy of PANAMA isn't the trade paper edition shown above, but a thin, cruddy paperback with a warped bottom that makes me wonder if its original readers didn't down it in a hot tub. If the physical form a book can model its contents, that's what PANAMA is: cruddy, hot tubby, steamy as the Keys in June. In other words, it's exhilarating in all the right taboo ways.

[David Rice · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautiful twitchy frazzled 70s mania...

[Heronimo Gieronymus · Rating 5 out of 5]

If one begins by referring to one’s self as “one,” is that basically the whole shooting match? Piffle and codswallop; I got a line on a winner. One sets out in earnest to take a stab at doing right by the great Thomas McGuane and doubtlessly, hard times what they is, one comes up with pocket lint and pennies, the latter of which we don’t have in Canada anymore, and little else, having overthought the launch asking stupid-ass baby questions like “What’s the best way to start?” Any way is a way—away with you. I begin in deference to a part of myself I would never dare ask you to flatter. Call it the grievance of an unkissable toad forced to learn to gift-of-gab in the spirit of revenge...if call me you must. I know I read an article on Thomas McGuane in THE BELIEVER, San Francisco’s Ultimate Craft Beer of Magazines, certainly more than a decade ago, and that I was inspired by the article, which I loved, but additionally vexed by it, as I hated it also. One—that’s me!—needn’t have to be necessarily over-crafty with the search engines. I have found the article, it is by Mark Kamine and bears the title “The Late Style of Thomas McGuane.” There is no need to bear much of a grudge against Mark Kamine or the specified piece of writing, which I have just revisited. I am going to start writing about this stuff, and, I warn you: it might not really sound like I don’t bear much of a grudge; I’m liable to come off a real shit. The great Mindwestern Master Thomas McGuane, son of Wyandotte, Michigan, writing fellow at Stanford starting in ’66, a post then not super-long-abandoned by Ken Kesey, and all around literary rock star running a jerry-rigged program so ultra hot it is a legitimate wonder he somehow drew short of flaming determinately the fuck out, afterburners screaming bloody murder. Something happens toward the end of that most hellacious of decades, the 1970s, and soon McGuane’s work and life are going to be all-in with Montana and ranching, believe it or not. PANAMA, bless us and bless you, is 1978—a novel, then, that constitutes a very informative, ruthlessly useful future anterior caught in the luminescent preservations of some kind of amber. Here, for instance, is the exact mineral essence of this personal and historical and eminently occult sustain, provided by the swashbuckling masterpiece with which we are concerned: giving up, fleeing the paranoid field of your global employ, deep-sixed in Key West, nervous system a going concern as in headed off well and good for parts unknown, and he, the man himself, the precise individual mad enough to speak on behalf of the inmates, even if comprehend him they cannot, just slumping down like a sack of moribund potatoes, as does our hero, who feels very much like our novelist’s direct representative, monologist rock star Chester Hunnicutt Pomeroy, who confesses to having also as part of this solemn ritual cast a dazed vote for Jimmy Carter. Anyway, to risk getting into the straw man business, it is unambiguously the case for craft beer enthusiast Mark Kamine that the desperate need to get out of the grips of a terminal psychedelic haunting of some kind is probably serious business, the fleeing McGuane is writing about in 70s probably advisable if supervised, and that everything that happens in Montana trumps what cometh before. The outlay: “formalities of diction and syntactical quirks” in the early stories and the first three or four novels (those written between 1969 and 1978) make way in fortuitous Montana for late style proper and “later novels [that] have become increasingly less mandarin, less verbally frantic, and less dependably outré.” You almost want to end that with the actual schoolmarm’s gavel. Later, Mark Kamine formulates the maturation schematic as a move from zany Punch-and-Judy to “comic realism,” and we can of course note that he is essentially selling the Gospel According to M.F.A. Workshops without being remotely upfront about it; could anybody really blame us were we to once again take a moment to be amused by the Central Intelligence Agency’s role in the creation of the Iowa Writers Cell? I kid, I kid. Really though, whether you are Mark Karmine or Jonathan Franzen or some other notable blowfish with a particular kind of opinion that will tend to vex me, it is hard to improve upon Paul West, who in his godly 1985 NEW YORK TIMES essay “In Defense of Purple Prose” bemoans (ever-purply) the neglect of “the almost lost art of phrasemaking” which “attracts the scorn only of those who have never made up a stylish phrase in their lives, as if style had become taboo, a menace to people, gods and cars.” Do we not all know—Mark Kamine included—what they put Oscar Wilde through and the real dish as to the why? Interesting to append here also that Mark Kamine has gone on to co-produce David O. Russell movies, which, with all the cocaine, yelling, and fisticuffs that occur on those sets (and leak from them), you’d have to image more akin to the earlier McGuane than the later. Look, if I have a dog in this fight, it is largely because of my whole relationship with language, purely in and of itself, which is my actual Pharmakon, as well as with the peculiarly mad way the world and I keep popping off unaccountably as though locked in something as glorious as holy coursing vinegar, though really I should think that it’s above all a matter of the extremely powerful recognition of what what was going on with me in my twenties having made me believe Thomas McGuane’s second novel, THE BUSHWHACKED PIANO, one of the most extraordinary things I had ever read, the occasion of my reading that novel having been fresher in 2007 when you can be assured I would have been inclined to be even more prickly with Mark Kamine than I am now, especially had I not just completed reading PANAMA, which is officially currently just about everything to me. The main book that summed up the progressive addiction and mental health brownout also known as my twenties, which may have been unconsciously modeled to some extent on country singer Hank Williams, who never quite saw thirty, is Georges Bataille’s BLUE OF NOON, a totally harrowing account of nervous exhaustion and obsessional catalepsy, pure human shreddage and brutally addled necromancy. The Thomas McGuane of THE BUSHWHACKED PIANO was on almost the exact same trip, amazing enough, because he used it above all to mine raucous comic gold, such that Bataille’s auxiliary, harried by the necrotic flesh of worldly affairs and the highly excited flight instinct that if called to account couldn’t a soul tell sweet fuck all about the pure terror except for something approximating the vivid ordeal it feels like, would become a Thomas McGuane avatar with the mere addition of a little Percy Bysshe Shelley, the anarchic quicksilver thrusts and parries of Groucho Marx, plus damned certain a whole freight of Mark Twain. It’s still there in PANAMA, a novel that preempts its bad reviews, McGuane using the uncannily self- and situationally-aware Chester P., de-famed famous "pervert" (maybe a mere pre-vert) corrupting all that is Good and Christian as far as Christendom may deign to project itself, the nadir of whose public life (or lives) found him vomiting on the mayor of New York, such that both the author and his creation are able to communicate that they know full well and are basically cool with the fact that a kind of hit has been put out on them. The first shoe has dropped. Key West. Florida. The state that looks like a wang. The second shoe? The question, my friend, is surely the backdoor to metaphysics, doubtlessly entwined with, ahem, the ocean “hauling its thousand miles with phosphorescent pull.” Power to the Purple! “The lottery—the bolita—was silent; it was always silent. And behind the wooden shutters, there was as much cocaine as ever. I had a pile of scandal magazines to see what had hit friends and loved ones. There was not one boat between me and an unemphatic horizon. I was home from the field of agony or whatever you want to call it; I was home from it. I was dead.” When the fuses start going on Kid Cabana, the Oedipal fuse busts first, and it is not only Chester who has notched his own death, it is his father too he walks around declaring dead, though family and friends insist on reminding him that the man is alive and well, a successful guy who loves and misses his misfit son. And his father is not Jesse James, the outlaw, who is not dead, says Chester, who is himself Chester, maybe, but definitely terrifying and divine. “Something started the night I road the six-hundred-pound Yorkshire hog into the Oakland auditorium; I was double-billed with four screaming soul monsters and I shut everything down as though I’d burned the building. I had dressed myself in Revolutionary War throwaways and a top hat, much like an Iroquois going to Washington to ask the Great White Father to stop sautéing his babies. When they came over the lights, I pulled a dagger they knew I’d use. I had still not replaced my upper front teeth and I helplessly drooled. I was a hundred and eighty-five pounds of strangely articulate shrieking misfit and I would go too god damn far.” The poor kid got hijacked by the American nightmare, overperformed, persistently crashed the mainframe, and maybe accidentally became a Taoist immortal (though try telling that to your Mark Kamines of the world). “I wasn’t making the best of the conversations. I don’t quite know why, except insofar as it was part of this trajectory of declining hope which had gone so far in depriving me of what I formerly considered worth working for. For instance, I will soon be broke. Already, on the occasion of massive overdrafts, where once an obsequious vice-president would appear at the door, I now got an ill-tempered trainee with a pencil behind his ear who menaced my dog.” Later, closer to absolute limit, both more and less dire, purer, like a real good horizon or a crystal: “I look up to tell her that I have hurt my head but noises even I can’t make out pour from my mouth.” Shits and giggles, a party down at Casa Marina, orchestra on hand. “I considered the wonder of the things that befell me, convinced that my life was the best omelet you could make with a chain saw.” If you are running around with a hot rock that doesn’t exist a sensible person might tell you to drop that rock. Obfuscation may buy the silver tongued devil his evil biding-time. Chester, to the concupiscent counterculture kitty Marcelline, a minx all too familiar with the shot reputation in all its gaudy particulars: “I did that. I believed myself though. I thought if I turned myself into enough of a goblin, everybody would come out and say what they had on their minds. Ha ha ha. What did I know.” I have tried this exact thing! A lot. I spent a lot of time as a inpatient, myriad facilities. More anon. Stepmom is in with the power brokers, nutty as a squirrel or a fruitcake or 1978 or whatever. “When I got to Roxy’s, all was not well with her. She was now engaged to marry Peavey and she was rolling around the floor, fully dressed, crushing a fine old straw hat with each revolution.” And there is Catherine, the original beloved, or comparatively original, a time when origins could have been considered with respect to at least illusory sequence, the woman he married in Panama, though neither he nor she recall it. Yes, forever and ever yes…and there is Catherine…“and then she lit up in her silver splash and disappeared.” The young Thomas McGuane, who earned emphatic praise as a prose stylist from none other than Saul Bellow, the giant of prose style, who you couldn’t do an Oscar Wilde on without his outright beating your ass in recompense (and who was actually born in Canada), is, I am convinced, a person practicing chaos magick or black magick or sex magick or whatever you want to call it, provided, I guess, you keep the k in magick and the rig at a holistically tenable speed. I see it, it works, I think I can run a similar apparatus—that it will work in prose and in life. I don’t at all take exception to what Mark Karmine quotes the older, wiser McGuane himself as saying, i.e. “As you get older, you should get impatient with showing off in literature.” It’s a precept I will not object to until I see it conducting itself like an ass. The reason PANAMA is still kind of Graucho Marx BLUE OF NOON has a lot to do with stuff like “unusual stress and an urge for mayhem” or “my pinwheeling insides and flying feet,” which, for a guy, myself, who did all the emergency rooms and psych wards and treatment centres, had his kidneys fail and his blood replaced et cetera, is basic stuff he's obliged to carry along 'with' when he goes out to buy a simple loaf of bread or small container of Aqua Velva. Thomas McGuane’s first wife, who subsequently married Peter Fonda, was a direct descendent of Davy Crockett, his second wife the Canadian celebrity who played Lois Lane in the movies, and his third wife, to whom he remains married on their ranch in Montana, is Jimmy Buffett’s sister. McGuane married these women, respectively (if not always respectfully) in 1962, 1975, and 1977, part of some kind of a run. In the insanely great (i.e. utterly bananas) 1975 film he made out of his novel 92 IN THE SHADE, Peter Fonda, who marries McGuane's first wife, does a scene in the bath with Margot Kidder, McGuane’s second wife, in which Kidder explains that soap on a rope comes on a rope so that you can retrieve it if you swallow it. How is that not everything everybody wants from life? Well, of course, it’s questions like that that render some of us permanent, unmistakable, freak misfit world-ruiners, who, I’m telling you, Mark Karmine, really come to need one another, even if we have to go off looking in other centuries and worlds. I have a lot of love for the Thomas McGuane of Montana, too, don’t get me wrong. We’re practically neighbours! And if Chester Hunnicutt Pomeroy is obsessed to the point of its becoming an unsightly malignancy with his being related by blood to the outlaw Jesse James on his mother’s side, I make the same claim, except on my paternal grandmother’s side. This is not codswallop. My grandma Laura was a rural school teacher and genealogist who survived the depression and tuberculosis, not one to fuck around and play possum. We connect to Frank and Jesse through the Brady people, I believe, and we do it by blood. Finally, since 2021 is at least every bit as much an arrested future anterior as was 1978, maybe McGuane has some sense of how we might go about keeping Jolly Roger at mast. Well, shit, certainly. Perforce: “A person I trusted at the time said it was time for me to go home, because home was a controlled environment, and that I was having a destructive effect on all and sundry out in America. It is time, he said, to leave the Sherry-Netherland and to go home; the dog is eating everything.”

[Dan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Books are powered by different engines. Some are plot-driven, some character-driven. Then there are those that are more impressionistic, tethered by language. "Panama" fits into this last category. McGuane's sentences crackle with wit. He's a master at combining high and low diction, proper nouns, slang and technical jargon into a poetry of sorts, reminiscent of Barry Hannah. This type of word-drunk writing is fine in the short form, and both Hannah and McGuane excel at the short story, but neither of them is quite as adept at keeping readers hooked for the long haul. The style is great, but after awhile you need something to hang it on. Stuff needs to happen. In "Panama," nothing much does. We've got a washed-up rock singer named Chet, an Ozzy Osbourne type whose antics onstage and otherwise have led to him being labeled a depraved pervert. He basically hangs out for the duration of the book, wandering Key West, eating at restaurants, visiting relatives with whom he doesn't appear to have close ties. He's drawn to a woman--to her detriment--named Catherine, and the two laze about in various settings. Catherine is trying to shake loose of Chet. Her gift to him is hiring a private detective to tail the rock singer and report to him the gaps in his memory. The book is so full of odd encounters, paranoia, and non sequiturs, all told from Chet's point of view, that you start to wonder whether he's fully sane. About midway through the book, for instance, he begins an obsession with Jesse James, convinced the outlaw still lives. I truly believe McGuane was trying to capture the mindset of someone verging on insanity, and I think he does so convincingly, though this doesn't make the book much more readable. I think the book's theme (if it has one) deals with the effects of malaise: what might happen to people faced with too much time and money. Because while Catherine gestures toward escape at the end, Chet goes nowhere and does nothing. Aside from the fact that he comes to some semi-articulated realization about his father, his life doesn't change. Maybe I would've had more patience for this book when I was younger, but as someone with very little time OR money, I'm less than compelled by this treatise on privilege run amok.

[Kevin · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Goodbooks summary posted for this book has absolutely nothing to do with the book I remember reading --that's just how great this novel is. I read it late in my extended adolescence and it was a perfect summary of my life strategy. Wasted youth is wasted upon the wasted young.

"The Dog Ate the Part We Didn't Like"

[Steven · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my favorites ever. more to say soon: fucked up!

[Tim Porter · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Seventies were a Humpty-Dumpty decade. A lot of people fell off the wall and couldn’t put themselves back together again. What was left of them got hauled out in the backwash of the Sixties, caught in the ragged, jagged remains of illusion as an era of hopeful naivete gave way to the intentional darkness of Reagan and what came after.

In those years, there was a lot of ugly – Watergate (and the death of what was left of American innocence); radical whites bombing buildings across the country; self-styled revolutionaries kidnapping newspaper heiress Patty Hearst; a crazy woman trying to kill Gerald Ford in front of a famous San Francisco hotel; a homophobic ex-cop in fact killing that city’s mayor and its first gay supervisor; a courthouse shootout connected to the Black Panthers and Angela Davis; and the degradation of what a decade earlier were seen as (perhaps foolishly) symbols of peace and love into excuses for addiction and depravity.

It wasn’t a good time to live through.

Nor, in the talented hands of Thomas McGuane, is it a good time to read about.

I am a McGuane fan, but I struggled with Panama, which is set in the Florida Keys in the mid-70s and tells the story of a native son who becomes a famous rock star, trashes his career with dope, drinking and other excesses, and returns home to those humid spits of sand with his emotional guts hanging out, his coping skills ravaged, and his status as a civilized human being in doubt.

Chester Hunnicut Pomeroy was his name, and my problem is I knew of a lot Chesters. Not rock stars, but wannabes who ended up as never-weres. Some of them survived, as I did, with mostly bangs and bruises; some of them survived, as Chester did, on life support; some of them didn’t make it. Skipping the details here, there was so much aberration and indulgence and self-destruction that we were shedding shards of ourselves on anyone unfortunate enough to be near us.

McGuane gets it. He traps the zeitgeist, skins it, sautés it, and serves it up – damaged, delusional Chester; his angry, duplicitous (yet still caring) wife; a drunken, needy stepmother and her violent, exploitative lover; the hideous human befouling of the beauty of Florida. It is a meal, to be sure, but it is a plate of pain that must be washed down with a bottle of scars.

I can’t decide if McGuane was celebrating the grotesqueness of the era or condemning it. Maybe neither. If fiction is a mirror to its times (and non-fiction is a microscope), then I suppose I can forgive McGuane (not that he seeks my pardon) for picking at this scab of a decade. All he did was hold up a mirror. It’s up to us to look or not.

The publisher’s blurb describes Panama as an “hysterically funny novel.” I suppose that’s right if you find head-on collisions hysterically funny. It is this sort of description that causes me to vacillate: Did I miss the whole point of the book? Did I take seriously something that was intended to be a joke? Did I miss the laugh lines? I don’t know. I laughed my way through the Seventies and didn’t realize until years later that it wasn’t a joke at all, so it’s possible I was looking in the shadows here for something sat in full sunlight.

Panama was published in 1978, and it occurs to me that I have now lived long enough that the contemporary books of my younger days could fall into the category of historical fiction. (What is the chronological cutoff point for that genre, anyhow?)

Ultimately, this is a sad book, as are all stores about broken people, real and conjured. In their pieces we cannot help but see parts of ourselves. The déjà vu of what could’ve, would’ve might’ve. There but for grace, a proffered hand and, often, dumb luck ... well, you know.

[Jess · Rating 5 out of 5]

With grit and beauty reminiscent of Hemingway, Thomas McGuane writes with an unparalleled flair for imagery. This book at once gripped me and tore me to pieces.

[Mickey · Rating 4 out of 5]

The dog ate the part we didn't like.

[Jake · Rating 3 out of 5]

Panama is not written with verbosity and the plot itself - if it can be truly called that - is void of any faint complexity. The complications within Panama lie within what is in fact autobiographical and which is synthetic. The characters are crazy, desperate people conducting themselves with their own poisoned passions. Chet at times feels like a Hemingway b-side and there is a sense of indulgence with this book, however it never commits the cardinal sin of literature, which is to be boring. It is at times like a pissed up soap opera, bouncing from plausible to ridiculous within the same page. It is not a great work and you can sense why someone would be indifferent to it. But if you’re open to letting the marauding mess that is Chet steal your attention for a while, then there is an enjoyable novel here.

[Briana · Rating 4 out of 5]

sweaty, running, sex

[H · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is McGuane's fourth novel, and the one that, depending on how you look at it, perhaps derailed his career (his previous book, "Ninety-Two in the Shade," was his most successful yet, and was a National Book Award Finalist). Apparently, in 1978, readers of McGuane wanted and expected his fourth book to take his style and form in a new direction, and instead they got "Panama," which is a lot like his first three books--at 175 pages, it's basically a crystallization, stripped-to-the-essential early McGuane.

Just by reading the back of the book, the plot of "Panama" sounds a lot like "The Sporting Club" or "The Bushwhacked Piano" or "Ninety-Two in the Shade." Burned-out rock star Chet Pomeroy, "Panama"'s protagonist, is essentially a stereotype of a McGuane protagonist--he's a screw-up despite meaning well, he tries to abide by an internal moral code despite weak and wavering internal fortitude and unfair and zany external circumstances.

But unlike the previous three novels, there's not really a plot here--"Ninety-Two in the Shade," for instance, basically culminates in a Western-style showdown; "Panama" has no real dramatic question or suspense. The closest we get is when local slimeball lawyer Peavy (the nearest thing to an antagonist to Pomeroy, because he is trying to marry his Aunt Roxy) sends his muscle Nylon Pinder to ransack Pomeroy's house. This moment ends with Pomeroy cutting Nylon's face with glass: "He turned in astonishment and what there was was very much like the earlier smile; but it went back to his ear on one side and you could see teeth all the way." After that, that thread shrugs and dies out. Pomeroy isn't really given anything to battle against except his own mind, a battle he will of course lose since his mind is something he's incapable of escaping.

We're reading "Panama" primarily to witness Pomeroy's dissolving psyche, which, due to drugs and a considerable degree of mental stress, includes hallucinations and faulty memories, the latter of which gives us one of the best passages in the book, in which Pomeroy and a writer friend watch a hotel burn down from across the street:

He had a pina colada in his bony surgical hands and he held it up like a chalice attempting to watch the burning hotel through the milky glass. I went home and wrote a letter to my brother Jim on the Olivetti. Then it seemed that I couldn't read what I had written. And hours passed. I don't know, you just drift away. Then you can't wake up. It's the middle of the night, no-man's-land. They're all laughing at your handwriting. It seems like a small thing but you suspect that it will kill you. One thing leads to another; daytime arrives on an evil wind. You can't get your hand off the doorknob, your teeth out of the girl's teeth. Increasingly, you can't remember anything and you are suspicious that perhaps you shouldn't. In the end, your only shot is to tell everyone, to blow the whistle on the nightmare. It will work for a while; no one knows how long. The worse the dream, the more demonstrative you must become. I took to the stage.

"Panama" is a first-rate tragedy--we know Pomeroy and his maybe-wife Catherine will never make things work, despite trying repeatedly throughout the book--and what's more, it has the feel of being a few layers removed from autobiography. Pomeroy's helplessness feels authentic: about half-way through, after it becomes clear the Nylon/Peavy plotline is no plotline at all, "Panama" takes on a melancholy McGuane's other books don't come close to--the ending of this book is the most inevitable of any of his books.

Readers would have to wait five more years for McGuane to "grow up," as his fifth book, "Nobody's Angel" (1983), is the first that really shows signs of his foundational shift in storytelling ethos that would continue to develop up through 2015, with the publication of his best book, "Crow Fair." But one book too late might have cost him to this day a wider readership. That's a shame because "Panama" is probably the closest thing to a real tragedy he ever wrote.

[Sara]

does not age well.

[Jay · Rating 5 out of 5]

So yes, there are people like my mother who will read the first two pages of this and toss it aside as a drug book. A bloody shame. This book has the chewiest diction of any other book I know, and it does things with the English language that you probably thought were against the rules.

The story is pretty good, the characters a handful, but I read it more for the language. Maybe this is what Lolita would be like if Nabokov did a bunch of blow and lost a bar fight immediately before writing. Outstanding, but you've got to have a little patience and a nerve for self-destructive behavior.

I'm certain that there are people out there that want me stapled to a tree for this review. oh well.

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was my first Thomas McGuane book, and I really enjoyed it.

If you've read Carver or Cain, watched film noir, and been acquainted with a hard nosed Americanism of men, booze, women, failure, bar fights, and regret, you will like Panama.

McGuane writes like a man who sat down at a typewriter at midnight, drunk as hell, and pounded out his words until 5am, collapsing on the couch, sleeping until 3pm, going out again, drinking and carousing, and returning to do the same writing late at night until the sun came up.

His descriptions are salty, direct, but somehow superbly crafted, never dull, completely essential. He knows how to tell a story, and you are entranced because it is all so vivid.

[Mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

Concerning, as it does, the Key-West existence of one Chester Hunnicutt Pomeroy, a disgraced rock-and-roller trying to come to terms with a life comprising, in varying amounts and to ever-shifting degrees, drugs, booze, sex, hallucination, humiliation, illusion, delusion, disappointment, fantasy, outrage, audacity, self-destruction, a perilously tenuous connection to reality, and an even flimsier comprehension of love.

McGuane writes like a man possessed by everything except imaginative limits. I couldn't put this book down.

[Bertis · Rating 4 out of 5]

"My heart had lost its purchase, its ability to do anything for anyone…"

Some jaw-droppingly good writing here; if you like to take note of great lines, you'll be busy with this one. It also has one of the finest final paragraphs I've read.

Combines the largely plotless, restless, numinous questing of a Brautigan with the ferocious, drug-related zing of Hunter S Thompson.

This is one I re-read every so often; I'm a little scared that I do so when my life most resembles that of the main character!

[Spiketea · Rating 5 out of 5]

The description is for the wrong book, in case anyone was wondering. A great novella on the lies, delusion and trickery of the late American Empire. 'Floating in my own invention." The ending is a killer, and like all of McGuane's work it revolves around fathers dead and alive.

[Allan MacDonell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thomas McGuane’s Panama, copyrighted 1978, is lush, sparse, cryptic, crystal-clear, elegant, brusque proof that a time existed when the artful maundering of a burned-out pop idol could be right there in the neighborhood of fascinating, at least in fiction.

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sort of impenetrable because you're witnessing a former rock star (?) experiencing an extended manic episode in the Florida Keys but it's full of compelling turns of phrases and fried imagery that occasionally brings to mind David Berman's mystic hallucinations

[Katie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oh!

[Erik Wyse · Rating 4 out of 5]

McGuane's inventive prose here paints a unique, black as night comedy that never fails to draw the reader into it's twisted reality.

[toulmin · Rating 3 out of 5]

somehow very pretty

[Mike · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was going to comment somewhat flippantly that this is a 70s novel about a screwed-up guy wandering around some godforsaken part of America and looking for people to do drugs and have sex with- in other words, a 70s novel- but first of all there's nothing wrong with that, and second of all such flippancy would belie the genuine humor and pathos I found in this story of a prematurely washed-up rock star named Chester (or "Chet") who now seems to be losing his mind in Key West, believing among other falsehoods (?) that his father is dead and that Jesse James is alive. But what didn't I like? It initially seemed that McGuane was a little too beholden to his narrator, too easily satisfied with and celebratory of his antics and smartass comebacks (in fairness, I also might have been prompted to this impression by the back cover's claim that "Chester emerges as the pure archetype of the McGuane hero"), which started to make it feel like Bukowski for the New Yorker crowd, a halfway respectable Bukowski- and who the hell needs that. That impression was perhaps exacerbated by the first-person narration, which doesn't allow for any of the other characters to seem remotely three-dimensional, only to be glimpsed through the haze of Chet's warped perception. Ultimately, though, I think McGuane infused the story with more ambivalence and earnest searching than I initially gave him credit for. In its sometimes incongruous and emotionally-occluded dialogue, in its depiction of a drug-addled and crumbling milieu of inherited wealth, and even in its hints of the metaphysical, the novel put me in mind of early Bret Easton Ellis- if, that is, Ellis's books weren't so emotionally cold, if they had a bawdier tone and if their characters occasionally took some rakish pleasure in their excess. Overall I liked it by the end, and the simple question of whether this guy would find a way to stop seeing ghosts and make his life better seemed appropriate for the first few days of the new year. They say that this novel was a departure for McGuane, which is however a little confusing to me, since some of the scenes have already started to blend with my memories of the movie Ninety-Two in the Shade (adapted from an earlier McGuane novel), which as far as I can remember was more-or-less the same story. Or maybe my memory's getting as bad as Chet's. 3.5.

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm not really sure what I just read. This is a tale told by Chet Pomeroy, the end of a line of shipbuilders in Key West. Chet is a former musician and current bohemian meandering through a partially fantasy life in the keys. Chet has a memory problem, so his on/off girlfriend/wife hired a PI to follow him and report to Chet his activities. He also has a hard belief that Jesse James is alive and well, but his father is dead. The former is definitely false, and the latter.....who knows. Chet is a completely unreliable narrator, and his story reads much like HS Thompson or a whacked out Kerouac, spouting off odd information while usually high on something. An odd book indeed, right there along side 92 in the Shade. Oh.....it must have been a helluva time in Key West in the 70s!

[Jackson · Rating 2 out of 5]

Panama has plenty of promise, at least in an aesthetic sense. Rocking and rolling through the freak-show of 70s Key West, coked-out wastrels shaking off the night's excesses on Kodachrome beaches - glistening margaritas hoisted by ravaged souls ... sounds juicy, yeah?

But the long-haired grittiness can't sustain interest in a narrative that's just so thin.

I'm hardly the sort of reader who perceives a languid character piece as being "about nothing", but I'm going to make that call with Panama. McGuane's washed-out narrator wanders Key West for a bit less than two hundred pages, tries to care about a few other characters and fails, enjoys some Bukowski-esque liasons with a few stock hellcats, then trails off into piffle. That's all folks.

There is raw material here: decayed Southern lineages, the arse-end of celebrity, rugged masculinity, something about Jesse James.... but it's all second fiddle to bizarro antics and dick-swinging displays of wanton self-destruction. And yet all relayed in such fine prose. TMG very much occupies the 'writer as tradesman' niche, but he can get to the heart. He just doesn't do it often.

Wasted potential? Maybe Panama turned out more autobiographical than TMG expected.

[Melanie · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book was, well - interesting. I kept thinking either it was way above me or way below me, but I've concluded it's just bad. Kind of a stream-of-consciousness rant from a deluded, sex-crazed, drug addict. Not my usual fare. Kinda like Hunter S. Thompson, only not good. I'm not sure why I finished it, I guess I wanted to see if it had any redeeming qualities at the end. Nope. Plus, I wanted to meet my Goodreads reading goal for the year!

[Charlie · Rating 5 out of 5]

McGuane's Panama is a novel-tract regarding the emotional desolation found at the end of fame and excess. It's fairly astounding that this nearly derailed Tom's writing career and brought about a hard reset to his life, considering how coruscating and bruising it is towards itself, and bruised and tender as a result. Perhaps many readers couldn't look past the drugs and rock'n'roll and bodily fluids of it all.

[Ryan · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5 stars. Needed a bit more plot. But, still cracking wit and biting, tragic humor throughout kept me interested. There are many laugh out loud lines, interruptions, and unexpected comebacks that are truly enjoyable. I have to say, though, if it was a longer novel, I may have ended up putting it down. Of the two, Ninety-two in theShade is th superior Florida book for sure.