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.

The pain of Skelton’s dreams and his fatalistic and doomed journey across the coral reefs of the Everglades is 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.