THE AGINH OF TRAVIS MCGEE
March 17, 1985
THE LONELY SILVER RAIN By John D. MacDonald. 232 pp. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. $15.95.
JOHN D. MACDONALD'S enormous narrative gifts have carried him and an ever-growing number of readers through almost 70 books. Twenty-one of these volumes have recounted the life and times of a modern knight-errant, Travis McGee, a series figure introduced in ''The Deep Blue Good-By'' in 1964, when Mr. MacDonald made the conscious decision to go for the big time. Most series figures remain static - but McGee has changed in subtle ways over these 22 years, and for the most part Mr. MacDonald has proved that one need not be sloppy, lazy, or utterly commercial in maintaining the flavor of the good old stuff. Formula fiction keeps the reader coming back for more - and no one does it better, or with more integrity or respect for his audience, than Mr. MacDonald.
This book is about McGee's vulnerability to loneliness and advancing age. We do not know precisely what that age is, and as with all good mythic heroes, or cartoon characters, it doesn't matter too much for the reader. It is, however, beginning to mean something to McGee, quick red fox that he still is, for he has more than his share of aching bones from old battles and a bitter awareness that being a romantic does not lead to a good pension. An attractive and suddenly very rich widow proposes that she and McGee sail away together across the Pacific - Mr. MacDonald's books are always about boats, and hot sun, and the putative glamor of resort life, as much as they are about the persistence of evil and the near-randomness of honesty - and Travis declines. ''Too many had gone away and too many had died. Without realizing it, it had happened so slowly, I had moved a generation away from the beach people.'' He no longer enjoys the fun crowd at Fort Lauderdale, where he keeps his elaborate houseboat, the Busted Flush, and he is so generally surly he even puts his long- time friend Meyer, retired economist and essential narrative explicator of the very complex financial scams usually at the center of a McGee tale, off his French fries. McGee is bored.
As they gulp down this latest MacDonald - for his work is always compulsive reading - readers will ask whether it is author, hero or both who are aging. One can make a case that in ''The Lonely Silver Rain'' McGee is very nearly beyond his customary fun and games, with violent sociopaths and calculating women, and that he no longer finds sex very restorative. After all, McGee has been rescuing women in trouble, and lecturing us - very persuasively - on the evils of corporate greed (of which Mr. MacDonald may know quite a bit, less from his Harvard M.B.A. than from his residence in Florida among the real estate groupies) for over two decades, and he has grown a bit flabby, a tad slower, a good deal less caring. McGee has not admitted it yet, but I think he wears bifocals to read. He is, quite simply, less pleasant company these days. Too obviously, Mr. MacDonald draws the conclusion with an opening quotation from Andre Maurois: ''Without a family, man, alone in the world, trembles with the cold.'' Or perhaps it is Mr. MacDonald who has grown tired. In 1964 he published the first four Travis McGee novels, having made the decision to create the series figure that, if successful, would bring him the girl, the gold watch and everything. He was unwilling to see the first book into print until he had those three more ready to go, giving himself room to flesh out a real sense of character. The formula then as now introduced a girl in trouble, usually over a large chunk of money though sometimes over a lost piece of valuable property (McGee is in the ''salvage'' business, and he keeps half of whatever he recovers but charges nothing, not even expenses, if he fails). McGee knows where the pressure points of venality are and he stirs the mud up from the river bottom until someone, often a friend of his, more often a working companion he may respect but does not much like, is killed. The physical abasement of a loving and vulnerable woman follows, which makes McGee both angry and just careless enough to allow the personification of evil to get the upper hand. Then, through an understanding of the low cunning of others, McGee finally triumphs. Usually the final scene provides a bit of therapeutic sex but no long- term attachment on McGee's part.
Fascinating detail on some form of high-finance con game is standard, and no one does it better, with the possible exception of Dick Francis, who is equally clever at weaving economic arcana into his plots. The entire package is then steeped in an almost invisible yet pervasive sense of place, a kind of brooding sensuality that makes one think Mr. MacDonald could have written the film script for ''Body Heat,'' which like his work embodies a love-hate relationship with the turquoise waters and dreadful lemon skies of Florida. In the end the reader has been presented an entertaining, informa- tive slice of some genuine Americana. Mr. MacDonald is just about the best in the profession today - spare, wryly amusing, conveying a sense of moral outrage that is calculated to precisely the right nuance. He writes to be read, bought and remembered, and he believes what he says.
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In ''The Lonely Silver Rain,'' the basic outline remains intact: McGee finds a lavish yacht that a friend has lost, with three bodies, the flies already at them, on board. The tycoon who had hired him dies suddenly overseas, and McGee forces an autopsy, which reveals that a thin, sharp object had been stuck into the inside corner of the tycoon's left eye, causing a massive hemorrhage that was meant to pass for a stroke. Shortly McGee realizes someone is trying to kill him too, and that the widow wants him in her bed. The plot picks up steadily, as McGee receives odd mementos from a night-time visitor to his houseboat and follows a trail of drug smugglers to Cancun. Finally, in order to save himself, he must stir up a bloody drug war, which clearly makes his day.
Fine so far, except that there is really no scam, no con that is even interesting, much less described. The settings are flat, routine, neither Florida nor Mexico having any particularity that sets them apart from, say, the east Texas coast or Atlantic City on a hot day. Even the grungy aura of oiled bodies and young sex that Mr. MacDonald usually evokes with such sure distaste (he has a line he has used several times, about an unattractive girl on a beach with a curly wisp of pubic hair showing outside her bathing suit, that sums up his disgust for the untidy) is missing, so that the land we love to hate seems merely a tan and sandy silence.
Still, if Mr. MacDonald is a little tired now - of his hero, of his philosophy, perhaps even of Florida and its boat world - he has plenty of plot left over. The ninth account of Travis McGee, ''Pale Gray for Guilt,'' published in 1968, ended with the death from a brain tumor of Puss Killian, one of those broken young women nursed back - in Puss's case, temporarily - to health by Travis's special blend of Plymouth gin and loving sex. Cliche or not, the closing scene is both moving and honest. Now Travis learns that the long letter Puss sent him on the eve of her operation didn't tell him everything - 17 years later, he has (it does no harm to reveal it, for surely the Maurois quotation was meant to) a daughter who blames him for having left her mother to face her operation alone. This offers Mr. MacDonald an opportunity to show what he knows about aging, and loneliness, and McGee's growing distance from a former self.
''Maturity,'' Mr. MacDonald once wrote, ''implies the acquisition of a philosophy that not only functions, but that makes life satisfying.'' It is said that formula figures lack credibility because they cannot marry or die. McGee may not have married, but he now has a daughter off to college in the fall, high board scores and all. Mr. MacDonald is still taking risks, in small increments; and I suspect he is preparing us for the biggest leap of all, as Arthur Conan Doyle and Nicolas Freeling have done - suddenly, without further thought, McGee too will be cut off, killed almost in passing by one of the sociopaths who stalk the dark nights of his author's mind. And yet, those of us who have grown old with McGee can hope that Mr. MacDonald will allow him a knight-errant's true end, that with Don Quixote he will die ''old, a soldier, a gentleman and poor.''
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