[In the following review, Thornton admits that "readers who admire fiction that celebrates its own making will be drawn to Black Novel."]

Like many contemporary Latin American writers, Luisa Valenzuela delights in pushing language to its limits. Black Novel (with Argentines) is rich in puns, double entendre, and razor-sharp images. Here, for example, is a description of the habits of one of the main characters: "Roberta had probably popped that question into his head; it was her off-the-cuff kind of remark, jabbed into the listener like a banderilla."

Valenzuela is also fond of theorizing. Roberta Aguliar, like the other protagonist, Augustin Palant, is an Argentine novelist, though unlike him, she does not suffer from writer's block. "Write with the body," she tells him. "The secret is res, non verba [things, not words]. Renew, restore, re-create … Words lead you by the nose … Sure. We're all whores of language. We work for it, feed it, humble ourselves on its account; we brag about it—and in the end, what? Language demands more."

Valenzuela makes similar demands on our attention as well as ou willingness to suspend disbelief in the face of a very self-conscious verbal structure.

Set in New York, Black Novel opens with the motiveless murder of a young actress by Augustin, whom Roberta helps evade detection as they try to discover the reason behind his act. They begin by exploring the underbelly of the city. Somewhere in this miasma of addicts, killers, thieves and perverts Augustin met his victim, Edwina, after being given a free ticket to a play in a theater whose works are light years from Broadway's.

They visit Roberta's friend and confidant, Ava Taurel, a dominatrix doing a thriving business with chains, whips, and other instruments of degradation. Valenzuela makes it clear that their encounters in Taurel's establishment and other bizarre venues are intended to parallel Harry Haller's lessons in the underground theater of [Hermann] Hesse's Steppenwolf. These scenes are filled with wonderfully exotic characters, but Valenzuela is too enamored of nostalgie de la boue, and allows these scenes to go on longer than they should.

One of the novel's main strategies is to offer feints and diversions to distract us from the ostensible purpose of discovering Augustin's motive. Moreover, the mystery is complicated by suggestions that the murder may not have taken place at all. It appears that the two of them are collaborating on a play whose subject is murder. At one point Roberta's lover, Bill, says: "You two were writing a play."

"Yes. No. On and off, afterward I don't know."

"Tell me about it, if you can."

"There's a murder, I believe. Of a woman. At first I thought the victim was a man, but it turned out to be a woman and then I no longer understood anything. Why she had to be killed, anything. But he insisted. I still don't understand…."

The playwriting motif runs throughout the novel, as do references to [Antonin] Artaud, the theater of cruelty, and Roberta's passionate theory about "writing with the body." There is also passing mention of Argentina's Dirty War, which is elliptically resolved at the end where the various strands of the narrative are brought together in a metacritique of the novel's playful structure.

Everything but the Argentinean motif works to draw us further into the book. While we're given to understand that Augustin's writer's block is related to his inability to confront the horrors of his country's recent past and that he will probably go on to write about it, Valenzuela's summary treatment of this material does not do justice to the tragedy.

Black Novel illustrates the postmodernist's impatience with character and plot. Valenzuela assumes no direct relationship between fiction and external reality, discarding such connections in favor of a narrative that calls attention to its artifice by questioning its own identity. Here is an exchange between Augustin and Roberta:

"Tell me about the novel you're writing."

"I already told you, my novel is the one we're writing together. The other one no longer exists. It's been erased, obliterated, contaminated now because it forms part of this ill-fated novel. How to separate the wheat from the chaff? How to know where one begins and the other ends or vice versa?

Black Novel displays considerable panache; Valenzuela writes with the sure hand of a jazz musician improvising on a theme. But her stylistic virtuosity is achieved at the expense of Augustin and Roberta, who generally strike me more as loci for the author's ideas than as characters I can care about. Their discourse is too often more interesting than who they are.

On the other hand, that is part of what makes this kind of book. Valenzuela teases us with speculations about the truth (or lack of it), delighting in raising questions about the novel she is writing, which may be the novel that Roberta is writing, or a play whose subject is the novel we're reading.

Readers who admire fiction that celebrates its own making will be drawn to Black Novel. Those who prefer believable characters and a clear sense of direction will still find much to admire in the book's pyrotechnics, though it may be a little too self-consciously conceived for their tastes.