Where is Joe Merchant?

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Florida Keys Weirdness in a Book

Where is Joe Merchant? by singer-songwriter Jimmy Buffett is one weird book.

Even so, I haven’t enjoyed a book this much since Pride and Prejudice.  Known for such classic hit songs as Come Monday and Margaritaville, Buffett extends his Florida Keys weirdness into a novel I didn’t want to put down.

The main character, Frank Bama, has Buffett’s songs written all over him.  He’s a sailor, a pilot, and generally irreverent to all things conventional.  He’s accompanied by a broad range of characters—all of them weird and with varying levels of good and evil. 

The primary story has Frank helping his ex-girlfriend find out if her rockstar brother actually committed suicide a few years earlier or if the ongoing sightings of him are real.  But all the characters have their own peculiar stories.  It becomes difficult to tell if this is a crime story, a mystery, a romance, science fiction or a tale of the supernatural.  It’s all there, and surprisingly, it melds together really well.

The novel alternates between Frank’s first-person perspective and everyone else’s third-person narrative. Buffett exhibits a genuine knack for keeping things sharp and intelligent, and maintaining a pace that never bogs you down.

Buffett is masterful in the way he brings all the characters and their storylines together at the conclusion.  And as a bonus, he provides an epilogue that he calls “Further Adventures in Restless Behavior.”  In it, he lets us know how most characters’ fortunes turned out—even a couple hookers who had more influence on events than we realized at the time.  And his final two sentences close out the novel perfectly.

This is a book I’m going to want to read again someday.  If you like sailing, flying, or dreaming of cruising the Caribbean—all wrapped around a really entertaining yarn—go find Where is Joe Merchant? 

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Quotes

The only men I’d ever seen who were truly good at talking with women were in the movies, and we all know they use cue cards.

Roads are built in the easiest places we can put them.  Standing on the ground is like being an ant on a hill.  The world is a different place from the sky.  You feel it as a living thing, not just a street running through the middle of a town full of houses.

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