The Beach Girls

My favorite of John D. MacDonald non-Travis McGee books. The novel is set in a comfortable backwater marina beginning to be targeted by urban developers. The marina provides the usual neighborhood of beloved and good friends, tolerated neighbors, working girls, charter fishermen, newcomers, characters, hangers-on and visitors passing through with only living on and next to the water as the unifying factor.

MacDonald tells his story of these characters encountering and interacting in the late summer in the first person voices of his main characters. The narratives progress and reveal more and more detail about the characters, setting, conflicts. The narratives are interesting, teasing and revealing as the main narrating characters set the background, conflicts, hopes and desires as only the intimate and knowledgeable voices of old members of a community can. The story unfolds like an old friend catching the reader up on what happened this summer while they were gone on vacation over a beer in a shady seaside bar.

As personal crises, long-anticipated plots of revenge, on-going lives, lust, love, sex, and human foibles come to a boil under hot Florida sun, desires, needs and justices are satisfied and resolved by the characters and passers-though at the season's end party . . . and the resolutions are unexpected.

I saw someone listed this as A Travis McGee novel. It is not!, although this marina is a forerunner in MacDonald's imagination as the setting for Slip F-18 at Bahia Mar Marina, Fort Lauderdale, Florida. ( )

This is one of MacDonald's books where he lets several of the characters have their own chapters told in the first person, before finishing up with three third-person chapters. Since he is omniscient about people's motivations, their foibles, and their innermost natures, he is able to do this....

Of course, I'm being cynical here, but MacDonald is about the most confident writer I have ever seen at stepping into different personalities - even if his view of the relationship between men and women would have been perfectly suitable if he were writing about Neanderthals. You can't help but be carried along. This one has brawls, some pretty effective low comedy, a touching love story (he even brought tears to my eyes at one point!), an effective climax, and ties things up for us at the end in a nice gift box. And all of this in 157 pages. Too bad he isn't around to teach writing to our contemporary writers, who are doing their utmost to kill the art of reading, by not even getting their story started good until page 157! ( )

JDM wrote about sexual orgies so well he got away with in the times before the societal change, although he does intrude to moralize a bit about it. ( )