Reading: “Ninety-Two in the Shade” by Thomas McGuane
Ninety-Two in the Shade
by Thomas McGuane
My rating: 5 out of 5 stars
Published fifty years ago, in 1973, the novel Ninety-Two in the Shade tells a quirky story about Thomas Skelton, a young man from a prominent Key West family who is trying to be a fishing guide there. However, this is no Old Man and the Sea, as he is surrounded by an array of odd characters. Perhaps the least odd of them is his girlfriend Miranda, a schoolteacher with a freewheelin’ attitude about sex and relationships. Although he lives in an abandoned airplane fuselage, Tom still goes home regularly to visit his elderly grandfather Goldsboro Skelton, who is something of grifter-lawyer-politician, and his father, who has spent seven months in bed after his blimp factory and his whorehouse both failed. His mother, meanwhile, just tries to cook meals and tolerate the two men’s bickering. At the docks, there are Nichol Dance and Faron Carter, two older men who are also fishing guides, as well as Myron, the stuffy accountant. In the beginning, everything is rocking along fine for the laidback Tom until his friends a the dock play an elaborate practical joke on him, which leads him to set Nichol’s boat on fire as retaliation. This act prompts Nichol to proclaim that, if Tom ever tries to be a fishing guide, he will kill him. (This is more than an idle threat, since it is known that Nichol shot and skilled a man before he came to Key West.)
The novel was nominated for the National Book Award in its day, and I can see where it deserved the honor. The style is excellent and unique, the dark humor is well-wrought, the short vignette-like chapters structure the multifaceted story well, and the characters are off-kilter without being forced. There are also subplots that make the weirdness even more enjoyable, like Goldsboro’s ongoing affair with his middle-aged secretary and Faron Carter’s wife Jeannie having an obsession with baton-twirling and making unnecessary purchases. As I was reading, the novel reminded me of John Nichols’ The Milagro Beanfield War and also of Tom Robbin’s Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, both of which were published around the same time. I always know when a novel is really good, because I’m sorry when it ends. And I felt that way about this one.
As a side note, Ninety-Two in the Shade was also made into a film in 1975, with McGuane writing the script and directing, but it pales in comparison to the book. While the basic story is there, the underpinning that makes the plot interesting is absent. For example, the backstory of why Nichol Dance shot and killed the exercise boy in the moth costume is almost completely omitted, and is instead reduced to a brief jailhouse conversation after he “kills” the dock master— it just doesn’t work. As another example, Jeannie Carter’s sexual fetish about being a baton-twirler is so under-explained that it makes her behavior seem random and irrelevant. What is a shame is that the cast is great: Peter Fonda, Warren Oates, Burgess Meredith, Margot Kidder, Harry Dean Stanton. And with the writer himself leading the production, the movie should have been so much better than it is. (If you start looking for the movie, its title uses the numeral “92” not the words “Ninety-Two.”)
