Stomping Thomas McGuane is as rewarding to some critics as ranking him with all sorts of Famous Writers is to others. His earlier novels, The Sporting Club, The Bushwhacked Piano, and Ninety-Two in the Shade, lent themselves to this double-barrel treatment—and are regarded as annoyingly adolescent (mediocre Hemingway high on macho and drugs) or hilariously brilliant (superbly crafted with a strange new style). McGuane may be bound for glory, but it remains uncertain whether his final destination is the reform school or the literary tradition.

In truth, those novels are hilarious, often brilliant, and positively adolescent—a state preferable to the solemnity that usually weighs down such tales of young men trying, after a fashion, to become grown men. Indeed, the serious business in those books grew out of and was made palatable by the writer's wise-acre intelligence. In Panama, McGuane as smartass-at-large is less in evidence...