Panama: 0000 (Vintage Contemporaries) - Softcover

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

"Whatever risk McGuane may have sensed in attempting [Panama], the feat proves successful. The audience is left dazzled." -- The New Yorker

Chester Pomeroy is a washed-up rock star turned casualty of illicit substances and kamikaze passion. In the hands of Thomas McGuane, Chester’s story is 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."