The notion that a writer can accumulate notes, scenes, assorted peeks at sexy stuff, italicized thoughts, a little dialogue, myth and mystery without numbering the pages, and then perform the work of writing a novel merely by gazing prayerfully and distractedly at this heap of material and adding page numbers—this has done some damage to the art of the novel. Well, not to the art itself, of course, which has a vigorous tradition of survival despite all assaults, but to the craft as it is occasionally practiced. The no-page-number technique requires a long work table, for spreading out all the material, and perhaps a long weekend of rearranging, but not a long breath, for imagining the lives of important strangers.

The late numbering of pages asks the reader to make a leap of faith: This is so hectic, it must be profound. The horseperson has ridden madly off in so many directions, the bloody fragments must make a superior unity.

Not necessarily so.

Luisa Valenzuela, who comes to us with much praise from South American and Susan Sontag ("There is nothing like A Lizard's Tail in contemporary Latin American fiction"), very soon sets our hearts to beating more slowly:

A serious matter, the drums. They're the strength of the world that lies over the border. Drums, tambours, gongas, snares, bongos, tamborils, marugas, guaguas, gourds, tambourines, huehuetes, tablas. Those. I get strength from the drums and I give strength back to the drums threefold. The drumhead of my skin resounds, Estrella pounds in wild pulsations, I flail about and vibrate as if the hands of ten black drummers were playing me. Twenty hands with cold blue palms stimulating me with the sweet intensity….

And there's more.

The pounding Estrella of this quotation is both the third testicle and the sister of the protagonist of this book. I hate to disagree with the estimable Susan Sontag, but it sometimes seems as if everything in Latin American literature is like this, except for Borges, of course, who writes short. The action takes place, or perhaps takes place, in Argentina during the awful time of "disappearances," when the Perons killed and looted their country and Isabella Peron looked with favor on the magic cult in her honor. The Sorcerer who is the protagonist here is based on Isabella Peron's Minister of Public Well-Being. In Time magazine, Luisa Valenzuela has been quoted as saying, "Magical realism was a beautiful resting place, but the thing is to go forward."

The pain and anarchy of Argentina drive many a writer up the wall. Witness V. S. Naipaul's cold, brilliant and aloof essay, "The Return of Eva Peron"—but perhaps he had the advantage of not really caring much. Valenzuela shows flashes of wit and brutal cynicism, which at times compensate for the lack of novelistic energy: "I obey a Superior Being who dictates my behavior. I obey Myself." Or, at the end of the book: "Tyrannies are not what they used to be. Now they have replacement parts. One president falls and another is ready to take over."

Throughout the book there are epigrams, flashes of description, exalted moments of Writing. Certain conventional metaphors of mystery and degeneration receive their due: cocaine, ants, magic mushrooms, highfalutin polymorphous sex. (That's going forward from magic realism? The machine is in reverse gear.) "After making love—and there I have no reason to complain, it was always perfect with Navoni—I always put my foot in my mouth." This sounds like some special fancy Latin thing he or she is doing.

Valenzuela goes on to discuss exalted states of mind. There is no doubt about her strong feeling concerning the corruptions and richnesses of Argentine life, the despair and pain, the compulsive dreaming. The problem for her book is expressed in [Fyodor] Dostoevsky's attack on [Ivan] Turgenev: He pays too much attention to the tears on his own cheeks. When he describes a shipwreck, he tells how bad it makes him feel. He should pay attention to the drowning children, not to his own drooping gaze.

Dostoevsky was unfair to Turgenev, but his point about the vanity of writers is a good one. Perhaps a more generous case for Luisa Valenzuela and this book could be made; she is trying for intelligence and trying for magic; but the novelist here points to herself too much, points to the catastrophe—her ostensible subject—not enough. She broods about making magic too much to be able to make the magic. She wants to be wild; that's not the same as wildness. The novelist, as W. H. Auden said, must wear the uniforms of the just and the unjust alike—not just a gaudy motley. A tragedy needs to be placed in time, not in the question, "Your story no longer deserves to be written?"

Luisa Valenzuela has the grace to utter the criticism of herself, to both express the problem of her book and confess it. "I move, I keep on writing, with growing disillusionment and with a certain disgust. Disgust even with myself, for believing that literature can save us, for doubting that literature can save us…."