Time says that Thomas McGuane is, "a major American writer, one of the four or five best of his generation." The New Yorker observes, "McGuane shares with Céline a genius for seeing the profuse, disparate materials of everyday life as a highly organized nightmare." They are right, for a change; but what those reviews also prove is that this novelist is hardly Christmas help, although he's never had a smashing bestseller, nor accorded much discussion in university literature classes where literary criticism is vented like so much low level nuclear waste gas at a Republican owned power plant. McGuane's early fiction, set largely in Florida, is especially fraught with protagonists and antagonists galvanized in fluctuant noir and nincompoopery. Yet they also appear to be victims of a deeper and darker force that magnifies their native or acquired flaws. Nichol Dance, for example, the fated villain of Ninety-Two in the Shade (1973), "… was just a displaced bumpkin …part of the world of American bad actors who, when the chips are down, go to Florida with all the gothics and grotesqueries of chrome and poured-to-form concrete that that implies." The point here may be that Florida somehow attracts the terribly low and lost, then renders them even more remarkably aberrant and abhorrent. Carl Hiassen similarly observes of the sunshine state, "We've always been a doormat for dirtbags." But how or why is not revealed by McGuane (or Hiassen) in anything like certain terms.

McGuane's Florida certainly is, however, something like the Egdon Heath of Thomas Hardy's depressing The Return of the Native (1878-95). That association is comically suggested by the character Egdon Heath of The Bushwhacked Piano (1971). McGuane's Heath is a stereotypical slimebag Los Angeles lawyer whose intimidation tactics become too much even for his employer. But recall that in Hardy's tale the unforgiving waste land, the heath, reduces all that it touches. Clym Yeobright's dreams of becoming a self-taught teacher are obliterated when his vision severely deteriorates and he can no longer read and study. He resorts to the lowly station of a furze cutter on the heath. His bride, the lovely and otherworldly Eustacia Vye, decides to leave her Mister Right, then, but accidentally drowns along with her ex-lover, Damon Wildeve, on the night of a clandestine rendezvous. Egdon Heath is a spiritual sinkhole that absorbs and dilutes its sparse human population.

Florida does a similar job on Thomas McGuane's characters. In The Bushwhacked Piano, Nicholas Payne, a wisecracking Bohemian of sorts with something like a college education (and whose ego rivals in metaphoric square footage the whole state of Montana) teams up with the eccentric and obsessed C.J. Clovis, owner and founder of Savanerola Batworks, Inc. They contract to build a bat tower on Mente Chica Key, for big bucks from the local chamber of commerce. Thus they have to drive from Montana to Florida. But while three quarters of the novel circles over the efforts of Payne to deliver his girlfriend Ann Fitzgerald from the opulence of her disapproving big rancher parents, the real stuff hits the fan when the star-screwed lovers and Clovis enter what Homer Simpson calls "America's wang," Florida. File that metaphor.

Clovis, already a multiple amputee of the left side (which sometimes makes him look like a boomerang in certain sleeping postures) develops the noticeable symptoms of heart disease when the trio arrives in the Keys. But after tests at the Monroe County Hospital (built on a sanitary landfill) one Doctor Proctor tells him, "There isn't anything the matter with you. You are in the habit of illness. You ought to get out." There's a broader sense to the Doctor's words too, especially in his last sentence. But that meaning is not given complete articulation until Tim Dorsey unleashes his tales beginning with the 1999 Florida Roadkill. More on that in a fortnight or so.

Meanwhile, Payne is in the next bed with an acute proctological disorder commonly called hemorrhoids. "We each of us know instinctively that hemorrhoids were unknown before our century. It is the pressure of the times symbolically expressed. Their removal is mere cosmetic surgery." McGuane spends an entire chapter in meticulous description of Payne's surgery and its aftermath. The operation is tragically botched, however, by Doctor Proctor, as noted in Payne's complaint, "You bastards core me like an apple and let me have a hard stool two days later. That makes me laugh my God that makes me laugh!" Now there is genuine irony. So it is at this juncture that Ann leaves Nicholas to become a poet.

Nevertheless the bat tower of Mente Chica Key gets built, then stocked with bats captured from caves in north Florida earlier in the trip. The bats are given a dash of fluorescent orange spray paint to enhance the visual drama of their release at the dedication ceremony. But upon their release, "They were scattered at first, just as they ought to have been, circulating in the immediate area. But then they began to form up … then headed for the interior of the continent and disappeared."

Of course the gathering of citizens is outraged, and responds by angrily moving like Birnam Wood toward the speakers table where Clovis and Payne sit. Clovis promptly falls out of his wheelchair with a fatal heart attack. At the funeral of Clovis, attended only by Payne, Nicholas is arrested for fraud. He manages to pay back most of the money wrung from the chamber of commerce and so avoids incarceration. Then he heads north, making only two stops on his way out of Florida, one to revisit the cave from which he kidnapped the tower bats. To his surprise they "… had not been rejected by their friends and hung upside down from the roof of the cave like thousands of Indian River oranges." Then he stops at a border store and buys a harmonica.

According to one critic, the prominent Freudian Dr. Sigmund Bactine, of Bonefish Community College, the denouement of The Bushwhacked Piano is more apocalyptic than farcical; the batrium debacle is a conceit of humungous spiritual dimensions, an incident of extended architectural and zoological metaphor that signals something about the nature of Nature that has not flashed through an American book since Moby-Dick sank the Pequod. But the semaphore here is a bit more dismal and complex than the glorious wreckage of 19th century Romanticism that Melville heralds. The tower, rising tall and erect from one of those merry mounds of sand dividing the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea, is simultaneously an emblem of meddling human nature and uncontrollable Mother Nature. There is a spooky Stevensian ambivalence, then, fluttering about. "When man tries to devise things for the defeat or alteration of the natural world, usually those things turn out looking like a penis," Bactine observes. "But the phony phallus here is loaded with renegade sperms in the form of native Florida bats that by nature will not obey the will of man. They cannot be made to devour mosquitos upon man's orders, just as artificial insemination is often a bust, and cloning is risky business. In addition, under the auspices of Florida, such antics are doomed, ludicrous, and sometimes fatal; so the mosquitos remain to pester, infect, and kill."

So, we are not talking wang waving fertility cult here, anxious readers. It is rather the horde of conquest and destruction that Payne and Clovis represent, and a microcosm of so many carpetbagging, cretinous real estate developers and similar Bastards of Bushdom now descended upon Florida in a self serving pilgrimage to reduce the sometime sunshine state to some dangling penile mockery cankered with theme parks, golf courses, and condominium communities. Payne and Clovis, though, are no match for The Venereal Peninsula. Their demise is foreshadowed and fated the instant they think Florida. But while The Bushwhacked Piano gives us characters whose falls are hastened by their brief relocation to the grapefruit republic, Ninety-Two in the Shade chronicles the mutual annihilation that often ensues when erratic native and sleazy snowbird collide. It is a book of relentless (albeit comic) fatalism which seems to ooze from Florida's flora and fauna like ink from an irritated cuttlefish.

Thomas Skelton, of Ninety-Two in the Shade, is a Florida native who returns to Key West to put some stability back in his wasting young life. He decides he will have a skiff built for him and become a fishing guide on the flats. But Nichol Dance, the redneck fugitive from Kentucky who fancies himself the supreme flats guide out of Key West, will not condescend to competition. He tells Skelton he will kill him if he starts guiding. He follows through on the promise, but then is bludgeoned to death with his own gun by Skelton's fishing client, who then drives the bodies back to the dock in the new skiff.

The pages of the novel between Dance's threat/promise very early in the narrative, and the murder on the last page, are strewn with bits of great wit, existential rubble, dark humor, flashy cynicism, and unstable irony, all dressed up in marvelous prose. The book has a wonderful aphoristic toll throughout:

--- Upon occasion, a man had to manufacture his own hell-fire, either for himself or others: as one kind of home brew for the spirit's extremer voyages.

--- 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.

--- 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.

--- There is nothing like feeling your days are numbered. … This afternoon I had five orgasms, which would have been impossible if there hadn't been someone in town who wanted my life.

--- He knew that spiritual minimalism frequently lay waiting in the foothills where a ranch was exchanged for a golf course; and that the Spalding Dot, the Maxfli, and the Acushnet soared over the bones of dead warriors.

--- The bulk of the rest of his time would be used in aimless and pointless research in the natural world, from biology to lunar meditation; all on the principle, the absolute principle, that ripeness was all.

Ninety-Two in the Shade verily drips with such passages, scene after scene sloshing tragicomically back and forth against the damned naked shingles of a subtropical world that smacks of macrocosmic Chinese water torture. "And it is as if Skelton," says retired Florida State University professor Jackson F. Balldripp, "is so taken by the death ride he has chartered that he doesn't wish to get off of it. He seems intoxicated by his environment, and the dark fate it spawns. He is fascinated by Dance's threat and chooses to face its outcome, not heroically, but stupidly. I've seen Florida do this to many people, especially in novels."

Yes, The Venereal Peninsula does do that. Florida is the premier deconstructor of body, mind, and soul, a diabolic absolute whose lean and dark power is perhaps best defined by the life of Chester Pomeroy in McGuane's last and finest Florida novel, Panama (1978).

(Analysis of Panama is the next installment of The SPs.)