Ninety-Two in the Shade presents its readers with an enervated, plasticized America — "Hotcakesland" is McGuane's term — that is the logical extension of Nicholas Payne's experience in The Bushwhacked Piano (1971; see separate entry). Its hero, Thomas Skelton, returns home to Key West to escape the emptiness of the continent, but finds there only the lunatic fringe of his culture, arrayed in cheap hype and frantic consumerism. It seems entirely appropriate here that Skelton makes his home in an abandoned fuselage, next door to a flophouse where an alcoholic drill sergeant leads the hotel winos in a retching close-order drill each day: When the values underpinning cultural forms are overturned or withdrawn, only the hollow shell of those forms remains, capable of retooling for other, more dubious purposes.

What figured in The Bushwhacked Piano as caustic satire is here present as a sadder, more jaded assumption...