Eternal Curse on the Reader of These Pages is, like Manuel Puig's Kiss of the Spider Woman, developed almost entirely as a splintered colloquy between two unlikely companions. It is also, like the earlier novel, a structural failure, and for much the same reason: the conclusion, disastrously, comments on and "explains" an otherwise richly ambivalent and mysterious text. It is as if Puig lost his nerve and decided, for whatever reason, to serve that famous "general audience," an audience that is already grandly served by what Blanchot has called "the nonliterary book," the book that has, "before it is read by anyone … been read by everyone." Puig's natural readership, the readers of literary books, could comfortably fit into Madison Square Garden, but in this book he seems to be reaching out to snare the same people who think of, say, John Gardner as pretty complex. It's too bad, because Puig has something, most obviously a wonderful sense that the essential elements of life, life's serious "things," are precisely the elements of soap opera, sit-coms, and B-movies. Both Kiss of the Spider Woman and this new novel almost set these two planes one atop the other, so that they look like one plane. But both novels fail, and the failure is one of form; or, to be clearer, the novels fail because Puig holds his content to be somehow more than just materials, to be a set of ideas.

This novel's two characters are by turns (and turns!) dull, narrow, crude, envious, misinformed, and politically boring and ingenuous—and at times, disingenuous. Larry, the younger man, an American, even speaks of revolutionary "struggle"—here in the land of flabby unions, pots, and looms: the author's ironic sense of dopiness here is brilliant.

We are almost immediately aware that Puig is aware of the fact that he is writing an ambiguous comedy in which the deepest feelings about sex, love, family, marriage, patriotism, loneliness, and on and on, are proved to be also the "deepest feelings" of those who turn these things into the corrupt products of the market and national politics, those products that keep us dozing in the face of their familiar, pleasant, and undisturbing selves. All the dialogue is vapid, its "themes" but a weird reflection of things long ago debased. Puig has set himself a tough problem: to criticize cultural enervation in the same language that has helped bring that enervation to pass. So we read on. (pp. 1-2)

[Larry and Mr. Ramirez] have convoluted talks in the most hopelessly bad dialogue this side of comic books, the pulp magazines of my youth, and B-movies, in which one or the other of them plays the roles of victim, hero, betrayer, etc. It is delicious. Larry's life is taken over selectively by Mr. Ramirez, and, in part, the converse is true. Whole swatches of dialogue are repeated verbatim in different contexts, serving to change the "meaning" of the words—words that are already almost completely drained of meaning, so that language becomes a shadow of a shadow. It is very interesting work.

Even more interesting is that one slowly comes to suspect that Larry may not exist at all, but is an invention of Mr. Ramirez's, someone onto whom he can project his own misery and sadness, through whose talk Ramirez's ruined life can become that of another man, a fantasy American to take the heat of Ramirez's bad conscience. On the other hand, Mr. Ramirez may be Larry's invention: we have no true evidence for anything, since the text, which can be, as in all fiction, verified only by itself, gives us none. Even the places in the book are carefully restricted to names, words—nothing is described.

But then: The last eight pages of the novel are made up of a series of letters that serve to "explain" it, to tell us that Larry is indeed real (and worse, that he is the lout we were not sure he was); that Ramirez is noble and good, though mentally ill (we were not sure of any of these things either); and that the book has a "subject" after all, something like "appearances are deceiving." The effect is catastrophic, and the textual strength, the risk of the novel, disintegrates. The complex deployment of what Barthes calls the "middle voice" (in this case one should perhaps say "voices"), through which Puig permitted himself no authorial intrusion, is subverted at the very end of the novel, damaging its wholeness irremediably. This is terribly depressing, at least to me, since it is clear that Puig is a writer of luminous talents. (p. 2)