Party on

You want likable fiction? Well, likability is Jimmy Buffett’s stock in trade. Think of the refrain to his most famous song, “Margaritaville.” The hung-over expatriate “wastin’ away” on a tropical beach refuses to blame a woman for his plight. What a good sport he is, we think. And when, in the last verse, he admits that “it’s my own damn fault,” do we blame him for having made us assume all along that a woman had, in fact, done him wrong? No, we give him style points for honesty.

When a man shows that kind of finesse with a few words in a ballad, we can expect to be coaxed to fairly gush with goodwill when he gives us a whole novel. And so it is with “A Salty Piece of Land,” a picaresque yarn about the Caribbean adventures of former Wyoming cowboy Tully Mars, whom we first saw “taking my pony to the shore” and romancing waitress Donna Kay Dunbar in “Tales From Margaritaville.”

The fortyish Mars (who is at least partly from Venus) has realized his life’s ambition: to be “a good guy with a few bad habits.” He is laid-back but works hard and learns fast when he has to. He likes a good time but is neither a lech nor a party animal. People warm to him instinctively. The friends he makes include a Capt. Kirk, who beams Mars aboard his shrimp boat; Bucky Norman, who runs a bonefishing resort in the Yucatan called the Lost Boys; Ix-Nay, a Mayan shaman; Sammy Raye Coconuts, a gay hotelier who flies a flamingo-pink seaplane; Willie Singer, who sings, natch, like Buffett; and Cleopatra Highbourne, a 103-year-old schooner captain who scampers up the rigging like a teenager.

Mars must face his commitment phobia, especially when Donna Kay reappears in his life and an 18-year-old heiress seduces him at a spring-break “foam party” near Cancun. He eludes bounty hunters sent by Thelma Barston, whom Mars insulted when she turned his beloved Wyoming cattle spread into a poodle ranch. Finally, he agrees to help scour the globe for an antique Fresnel lamp for the lighthouse Cleopatra is refurbishing on Cayo Loco in the Bahamas, the “salty piece of land” of the title.

Most of the novel consists of tall tales the characters tell and letters they write one another. Add descriptions of exotic food and scenery and bits of information about boats, planes, fish, horses, shortwave radios, Cuban baseball and Solomon Islands cargo cults. These aren’t meant to be digressions. Buffett views them as the flow of events in a true adventurer’s life. Johnny Red Dust, a Crow medicine man, advises Mars to jump, that a net will appear and catch him. And so it does, apparently, if you’re as good a guy as Mars is, in a world where good guys and gals far outnumber bad. Lightweight stuff, to be sure, but it goes down like a pina colada: smooth and sweet. *