Chester Hunnicutt Pomeroy, the spiritually incinerated protagonist and narrator of Panama begins his prolonged, though hilarious, howl of despair by telling us that he is working "without a net" for the first time….

The statement could stand as a one-paragraph preface explaining what Thomas McGuane has attempted to do in this, his fourth and most relentlessly honest novel. This is not to say his previous books, The Sporting Club, The Bushwhacked Piano, and Ninety-Two in the Shade were dishonest or untruthful. They were, rather, less personal and more artful—taut, brilliantly written pieces whose style often called attention to itself and away from the characters it was meant to convey.

That style, sometimes compared to Hemingway's, sometimes to Camus', was McGuane's "net." In Ninety-Two in the Shade especially, you sensed that language was being used as a barrier against the horrifying void McGuane perceives as lurking at the...