In the 1980s, “yuppiebacks” attracted our attention. Thomas McGuane’s early novels were reissued as yuppiebacks, which were colorful paperbacks with irresistible cover designs, published in the Vintage Contemporaries series and the Penguin Contemporary American Fiction series. They featured writers like McGuane, Richard Ford, and Janet Hobson, and were marketed to readers in their twenties and thirties, some of whom were presumably yuppies. 

The cover art of Thomas McGuane’s novel, Panama, reissued by Penguin Contemporary Fiction in 1989,  hints at the exotic but very sad trajectory of this novel .  The cover illustration depicts a striped rectangle, perhaps a towel, on which are placed sunglasses, a mirror and straw, and a flower. These objects reflect the beach setting and the drug problems. 

The addled narrator, Chet Pomeroy, a retired rock star living in Key West, is depicted in the tabloids  as “depraved and licentious.” Yet he has a gift for expressing a poetic, humane, yet critical philosophy that captures our collective consciousness. He blames the mass alienation of Americans on “the age.” Read this as a parable about America, as a prose poem, or a poetic comedy:  there is so much I identify with here, in the way one does with novels that do not reflect our own experience, that I would have had to underline the whole book to do justice to Chet’s nuggets of wisdom.

What is Chet doing in Key West, which he despises for its commercialism and tourism?  Well, he had to go somewhere.  He briefly did a show called “The Dog Ate the Part We Didn’t Like,” but did not become notorious until he came on stage “crawling out of the ass of a frozen elephant and fought a duel in my underwear with a baseball batting practice machine.”

That was going too far, and Chet knows it. But from day to day, Chet barely remembers what has happened, so there is always a fresh start.  He is an addict, but the drugs replace something in him that is gone. He is not all there. And so he spends most of his time stalking his ex-girlfriend, Catherine, who may or may not have married him in Panama several years ago: neither of them quite remembers. Catherine wants to get a restraining order against him, but doesn’t quite have the energy. Concerned about his memory, she hires a detective to follow him and report to him every day what he’s done.

This is partly a love story, the story of Chet and Catherine, but Chet always goes too far.  High on cocaine, he nails his hand to Catherine’s front door when she doesn’t let him in.  She can hardly let this innocent out on his own, even though she has a new girlfriend, Marcelline, who is by the way, as messed-up as  Chet.  Chet and Catherine begin to spend time together again, and, as is their custom, take too many drugs.   

McGuane’s description of Catherine’s frailty and miserable jitteriness when she doubts she can sit still in a restaurant is grimly realistic. “’My nerves are raw,’ she said.  “We’ll have to go someplace where the service is fast or I’ll jump out of my skin.”  The couple are intertwined, but the drugs may kill Catherine.  Chet alone seems not to realize this.  His brain has lost so many of its finer points, yet he is likable, cheerful, and, as Catherine says, “a lovely man.” He doesn’t mind the drugs as much as she does, though both are addicts.

There is a huge cast of grotesque characters:  Chet’s rich, mad stepmother, Roxy, whose lawyer wants to usurp her land, whether by marriage or theft; two cops, Pratt and Nylon Pindar, who really have it in for Chet; Jorge Cruz, director of the orchestra Chet is determined to hire for a big party, though Jorge doubts the orchestra can play in a huge, weedy field that is the venue;.

And yet, despite the coke-fueled tragedy of Chet’s life, I can read McGuane all day. 

He writes,

“I noticed that many people I saw were surrounded by invisible objects.  Many of the visitors from New York had invisible typewriters right in front of their noses upon which they typed every word they spoke.”

and

“There is a trigger that makes the day begin and all life end and it breaks like a glass rod.  It lies at the middle of everything that breathes or dreams.  It will bend and break, and when it breaks it is night.”

Thomas McGuane, a great novelists and poet!