Longing

In the early '60s, Rosa Bernstein from Long Island and her Chilean expatriate husband, Antonio, wander from Paris to New York to San Francisco, ""in search of a novel to inhabit.'' Rosa is the quintessential victim, an unrealized actress, dancer and writer; Antonio is the evil touchstone, drunken, violent, insane, pimping, whose wit and perceptiveness are mentioned but never displayed. Unfortunately Longing often reads as though translated from another language, with awkward syntax (``A very sad blues was playing that slid into polyphony'') and off-the-mark colloquialisms (``Judith had lots of dollars''). All in all, the work seems unsatisfyingly mired in a late-'50s literary sensibility and early-'60s acid-head psychology and style. (February)