What Night Forgets

Like its narrator, who drifts aimlessly through Mexico in the late 1970s on a quest for poetic inspiration, poet Yorty's (A Few Swimmers Appear) first novel limps in the footsteps of more explosive countercultural exploits, lacking the whimsical yet powerful grit of Hunter Thompson's prose and the hallucinogenic urgency of the oft-invoked William Burroughs. As the novel opens, Pennsylvania native John Wengert, philosophical about the most recent in a long string of failed relationships, is looking for work as a cook in Oaxaca to maintain his minor drug habit. On his first day in the city, John meets up with Hugh, a figure from his past, who is now a delusional paranoid who insists he was brainwashed by the CIA. Soon after, John falls in with Julie, a free-loving, bisexual illustrator; Julie's companion, Kathryn, who is writing a children's story about an ideal historical Mexican girl; Christine, a French hotel developer; and Antonio, Christine's Mexican driver, who was abandoned to poverty by his American G.I. father. John spends his time smoking pot, seducing Julie and Antonio and reading poetry, but his self-indulgent Mexican idyll is brought to an end when two stoned German tourists incur the wrath of a mob of Mexican churchgoers. Although the violent climax takes account of real tensions between slumming First World travelers and their often unwilling hosts, the novel fails to transcend its genre as an escapist fable. (June)