From what she terms the "Argentine darkness," from the metaphorical alphabet city of New York's Lower East Side, and from the wild zones of "authority," gender, and language itself, Luisa Valenzuela has won a brilliant, difficult, involving text. In a 1986 interview Valenzuela said she was "stalking" rather than writing this novel, and signs of the five-year struggle for its production are evident in the narrative(s) of its protagonists, who are also authors: "To write about the immediate, almost an impossible task. One's arm must extend way beyond its reach in order to touch what is virtually clinging to one's body." In fact, the story-within-the-story is the recording of what seem to be meditations by the writer-characters, Agustín Palant and Roberta (whose patronymic is not given), on various aspects of its composition.

Originally entitled The Motive, the book begins with Agustín losing the door to the apartment of Edwina Irving, an actress he has just murdered, and whose name he has already partially forgotten. In the 1986 interview, Valenzuela described the work as coming out of her desire to write a detective novel: "I began one where the assassin and the victim are known, but not the motive of the crime. Not even the murderer knows it, and he searches because it is absolutely necessary for him to understand himself, of course. He's a writer who finally goes in search of his lover, another writer. Both are Argentines in New York and the search begins with an exchange of identities and all the paraphernalia that I'm interested in. They delve into the darkest regions of the city and of their subconscious. Since they are writers, they are very alert to metaphors, which doesn't mean they find what they are looking for, of course."

The starkness of that final "of course" belies the inference we are allowed to draw at the end, that at least Roberta, by writing and by loving, has been able to transform hers into an instrumental past, but it befits the tone of much of this novel, "extracted," as it reads, "from the folds of one's own sheets, in a clammy speleology of memories." The reinscription of the suppressed is the motive and the political ethos powering this novel, and through the crime of Agustín and Roberta's epic of complicity in concealing it, we get a heightened consideration of suppression, authority, and also of recognition and compassion—all the dynamics, Valenzuela might say, of fiction itself.

Like its characters, the text is preoccupied with traces. Agustín is concerned about inscriptions of blood on his jacket, the identifiable details in vomit, the traces "which are impossible to erase," which are hidden, appropriated, sublimated. Roberta worries about the evidence in his manuscript, which she hides in an S&M parlor, the suitable submergitory for repressible objects and oblivious encounters. Some traces read like circumstantial evidence, graffiti "left with graphomaniac zeal" in the narrative, and it is difficult to assess their importance to the engine of the novel. In this category I place the references to, and the stylistic or structural autographs of [Alain] Robbe-Grillet, Borges, and Barnes; the gender almost arbitrarily marked in names like Edwina, "Vic" (for victim), and Roberta; and the traces of horror and worship implicit in the Tompkins Square setting, "vortex of the forlorn": Ave. A, Ave. B, and so on. Yet, these tricks with letters retain the occasionally mystifying suggestiveness they held for the characters themselves, as if they were metaphors of great meaning.

There is no question that the novelist, herself an Argentine currently living in New York, deals profoundly with the exiles' burdens of traces of an "other" life. Memories of the past and in particular of the "desaparecidos" in Argentina threaten, particularly in Agustín's dark, incoherent case, to overwhelm attempts at their erasure. Valenzuela's interests in censorship, self-censorship, and objectification of the "other" lead her into an exploration of sado-masochism, where the complicity between agents and customers of pain forms a perverse mirror of the political relationship between dominators and dominated. Thus, she restores the regressive and political subtext to pornography, which is carefully depicted as such in passages rife with casual violence and sinister metonymies ("There are the torturers and the tortured, thought the ear …"), and implicitly confirms the obscenity of the wanton exercise of power, as well.

There is a certain postmodern claustrophobia to this enterprise. I have to admit that I wanted to put the book down, as its motives led its characters to visit various urban temples of the desolate—the homeless shelters, surreal soirées, the necrophiliac death chambers of artistic renown, the lengthy confinements in apartments so well described that you can see the cartons of takeout foods rotting in ethnic splendor in the refrigerator. Valenzuela's trademark "way" with secretions and contaminants is evident here, too; but the text is so well constructed that it provides a tight alibi for her sense of language as a secretion, "the most terrifying of all perhaps because of everything it conceals while revealing, or vice versa." One reviewer wrote that you have to wear rubber gloves to read this novel; he or she is striking, possibly unwittingly, at the heart of the author's notion of catharsis. Readerly sweat notwithstanding, I'd say that the source of the novel's grandest question, and Roberta's means of answering it, are unforgettable.

Valenzuela says she likes the translation, but recommends reading Black Novel in the original if possible, because the gradations of complexity in the Spanish "spoken" between native speakers and the Spanish-as-English spoken between foreigners are inevitably lost in translation.