Nehaveigur

This is Thomas McGuane’s most well-known novel and the first I’ve read. It captures 1970s Key West, a place and period that I’ve recently encountered through the documentary All That Is Sacred.

The novel isn’t much like anything I’ve read before. It’s off-the-charts playful. Some parts are funny, like this dialogue between the protagonist, his mother, and his grandfather and his bedridden father:

“How are things?” he asked his mother.
“Fine.”
“Mother, how are they?”
“Go over and talk to them.”
“Evening, Grandpa.”
“Tom.”
“How’re you feeling, Dad?”
“He feels perfectly well,” volunteered the grandfather.
“If no one will get that asshole out of here,” said the muted figure inside the gauze, “I will shit my pants and die on purpose.”
“Do it!” said the grandfather. “You malinger well enough.”
“Grandpa.”

A landscape scene:

When the sun first assembles itself over the broken skyline of Key West on a morning of great humidity, a thunderous light fills the city and everyone moves in stately flotation through the streets that are conduits of something empyrean. Also, things can get sweaty.

Premonitions:

The future cast a bright and luminous shadow over Thomas Skelton’s fragmented past; for Dance, it was the past that cast the shadow. Both men were equally prey to mirages.

Sex:

Some minutes later, wandering through the bathroom to wash his face, he struggles for purchase on the tile floor and falls into the tub.
“Are you all right?”
“I was struggling for purchase.”
“Here, let…”
Now she is in the tub with him. They struggle for purchase against the porcelain.

Fishing:

I like fishing better than ichthyology because it’s all pointless and intuitive.”

And finally:

A key-deer buck, the size of a dog, places four perfect scarab hoofs on the route A1A and is splattered by a Lincoln Continental four weeks out of the Ford Motor Company, carrying three admirals bound for Miami and a “kick-off breakfast” for a fund-raiser. The taillights elevate abruptly at the Pine Channel Bridge and are gone. The corporate utopia advances by a figure equal to the weight of the little buck divided by infinity; the Reckoning advances by a figure equal to the buck multiplied by infinity.