"You're magic," said the agent. "You're me all over."

"What you would like to be," I said, "I can make come true."

"There's only one thing I'd like to be."

"Let's hear it."

He grinned bleakly and said, "Runyonesque."

THERE IS desperation in this compact novel, and madness too. Tom McGuane is 38 years old now--Panama lunges and spouts like Hero's engine and reads as if the author does not intend to see 40. Chester (Chet) Hunnicut Pomeroy is the scion of an old Key West shipbuilding family, but Chet has rejected all that for fleeting fame in the three-chord world of rock and roll. Or something larger than that: A Mick Jagger-like figure with an equal part of Maharaji Ji and Keith Richard's bad teeth thrown in, he somehow got elevated into a spiritual godhead, an Oudpensky for our times. But somebody jumped the stakes on old Chet, and marked the deck--his final performance began with him crawling out of the rectum of a dead elephant to conduct a swordfight with a pitching machine, and ended with him throwing up on the mayor of New York. It was time to go home.

He doesn't give a fig for the shipyard. "I don't care about the money at all. I have put that shipyard up my nose ten times over." In cocaine, of course--Chet is what Raymond Chandler used to call a cokey, and Panama's prose comes to you through the paranoid fog of a rolled Benjamin Franklin:

My eyes were out on wires and I was grinding my teeth. When I chopped that shit, it fell apart like dog biscuit. Bolivian rock. I didn't care. I just made the rails about eight feet and blew myself a daydream with a McDonald's straw. Let them try and stop me now!

Pomeroy hasn't come home for his family--not for his stepmother about to marry the low-rent local politician Curtis Peavey, whose goons keep rearranging his caps--but to join his sweetheart Catherine, a woman he may or may not be married to. Stay away, she warns: "You called me deep-dish Southern plastic in a national publication!" She is a lesbian now, she maintains, having taken up with the bisexual Marcelline. Chet considers this only vaguely through a menthol cocaine haze. Then he nails his hand to her door.

"Panama," Catherine tells him later, flinging a certificate at him. What? "We were married in Panama." Oh.

THAT IS the only mention of Panama, of Canal Zone and right-wing Southern paranoia fame, in these 175 pages, but it is the crux of the book. Chet suffers from memory loss; Catherine hires a private detective to inform him of what he did during the day so that eventually he might get it back. Maybe, then, you can go home again--but what if you can't remember home, or what it was, like? What if you can't remember when, where, or if you were married? In a minor key, this translates into not remembering if you have eaten, eating three meals, and throwing up on a spotless Abe Beame. In a major key, it means insisting the man who is your father really died in the Boston subway fire of 1942. Either way, it's a hell of a note.

And perhaps Tom McGuane also suffers from memory loss--he has forgotten the Aristotelian Florida of 92 in the Shade, forsaken it for the Caribbean syndicalism of Panama. As Geoffrey Wolfe (one of our better book critics) pointed out in his review in New Times, this book suffers from many things, but most of all it suffers from the first person. But that first person telling also makes me think there is more to Panama than one might first notice: 92 in the Shade was a story of heat, moving at a seemingly languid pace, while Panama, underneath the cool cocaine fog, moves everywhere at once. In fact it moves no where, except back towards memory.

Parts of it seem influenced heavily by Berry Hannah--great chunks of the theme could have been lifted from the story "Return to Return" in Hannah's latest collection Airships. And Pomeroy's insistent belief that Jesse James is his spiritual guardian corresponds closely to the outlaw Indian Geronimo in Hannah's Geronimo Rex. But this is McGuane's own, and nobody, not even Hannah, deals better with the South of Holiday Inn Clam Plate Specials and exiles from the Bay of Pigs than McGuane. A drug bust is "too Cuban for words." Pomeroy's dog "kills a lizard; then, overcome with remorse, tips over in the palm shadows for a troubled snooze." The violence is lovingly plotted, coldly calculated, but respected. Councilman Peavey sends Nylon Pindar the thug to straighten Chet out:

He turned toward me when I came in and moved wide as his smile toward me and sent my teeth spinning through lamplight. It seemed an obvious extension of my beef with Peavey. But I asked him why he had hit the dog. This only reminded him and the grin became one of discovery. He headed for the dog and I headed for the tipped-over lamp. I picked up a piece of milk glass about the time he got to the dog and hit him in the side of the face with it.

He turned in astonishment and what there was was very much like the earlier smile; but it went back to his ear on one side and you could see teeth all the way.

"Run," I said. "You're bleeding to death."

A STRANGE little book, greatly flawed but tantalizingly good-groups of brilliant paragraphs sandwiched around prose that runs annoyingly flat. Tom McGuane jumped the stakes on himself; the epigram that begins the book is "The best epitaph a man can gain is to have accomplished daring deeds of valor against the enmity of fiends during his lifetime." Worthy sentiments, but that hardly makes the comic Nylon Pindar a fiend. More a shitsucker, in Chet's phrase, more Runyonesque. The Caribbean syndicalist novel is not an art form of the future; after all, Hero's engine never really ran anything; it just went around in circles.