NINETY-TWO IN THE SHADE
by THOMAS McGUANE
197 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
$6.95.
In many ways, Thomas McGuane is a throwback. Though he is just 33, his outlook comes from a time before black humor, the roman nouveau, and the new journalism, when writers and readers believed that fiction was the ideal way to capture the essence of experience. In some respects, McGuane is a literary descendant of Hemingway. Both men are rigorous stylists; for both, reality emerges from careful, linear detail. It has been some time since a writer has acknowledged, as McGuane...