Panama - Softcover

McGuane, Thomas

3.77

604 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140052747 ISBN 13: 9780140052749

Publisher: Penguin Books, 1979

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Declining celebrity Chet Pomeroy, attempts to win back Catherine, the girl whom he married (or perhaps did not marry) in Panama several years before. His quest for Catherine takes him to Key West, Florida, a centre of commercialism and corruption where nightmares stalk his waking hours.

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From the Back Cover:

"Thomas McGuane is the pool shark of our prose. His sentences click with imperious precision.... The words swerve with fatal charm."

-- Christian Science Monitor

"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

About the Author:

Thomas McGuane lives in McLeod, Montana. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the author of ten novels, three works of nonfiction, and three collections of stories.

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