Romeo Kuchmir is a character who has found an author who has failed to find a proper place for Romeo. Kuchmir is literally all there is to George Ryga's new novel, Night Desk. He is not simply a narrator, as was Snit in Ryga's earlier Hungry Hills. Romeo is a soliloquist who has seized a stage no one else seems particularly interested in, and swells roundly enough to fill it with anecdote.

The stage he has seized is the strip of floor space before the clerk's desk of a third-rate hotel in a western city. The audience that goes with it is the night man, simply "kid" to Romeo and to us. (p. 83)

In his first play, Indian, Ryga's chief character pleads to the Indian agent: "I got no past … no future … nothing!… I dead! You get it?… I never been anybody. I not just dead … I never live at all." Romeo is anxious to establish that he is the absolute antithesis of such a character: "I'm an outlaw, kid, a stallion. I'm goin' where I'm goin' an' no one asks me why."…

Romeo has tales, and no place to tell them except … before the night desk. There are no hungry hills here, no sense of dust and dirt and a place for such a character to strut his stuff about and be believed. We have not even a reasonable physical sense of Romeo: the kid [the novel's narrator] records words, not impressions. This man has only the body of the illustration on the book cover by Bill Featherston. What did Romeo or the kid, or Ryga for that matter, have to do with that?

And what sense does one make of the tales Romeo has to tell? He rejoices in the body, which is all well enough. He finds joy in twitting the order of things, pissing in the Winnipeg parking meters so they freeze up and are useless for a season. He talks rough, dropping his g's. He also talks too much poetry, thrown up against the roughness of originality….

[Romeo] has made what Brian Parker has called a Ryga folk ballad. Words trigger other words, responses, new anecdotes, old ideas. Everything weaves back on senseless legs to the same loneliness; and the only fact clearly established is that the kid is only Romeo's second-best audience.

Romeo is his own best audience. He is probably the most interesting Ryga character since Rita Joe. What is amiss is that he is alone: soliloquizing before the night desk. He is a character in need of other characters as strong as he. He has to be seen.

Ryga has not given us in a novel the other eyes he could provide in a drama. Romeo [the prize fight promoter] is too alone, in the centre of the poster with small pictures of his stock all about. He desperately needs a play. (p. 84)