In his three novels, Betrayed by Rita Hayworth, Heartbreak Tango and The Buenos Aires Affair, Puig has shown an incrementing skill, range of perception and control of varying emotions…. If the promise of these books is kept by Puig's next novel, and if he continues to be productive, Puig will show himself not only as a good writer getting better but as a major author.

Puig's novels exhibit their growth in a double sense. First of all, the maturation is evident in the subject matter. His books have progressed from a central focus on the formation of a latently homosexual child (Rita Hayworth), to the adolescence and early adulthood of a pampas Don Giovanni, to the adult catastrophe of a couple who emerge from the background established in the preceding books to inherit the fearful, sadomasochistic side of romantic love carried to its extreme in a contemporary society. Puig says that the novels are displaced "investigations" or "researches" into his own past, so the novels also offer a version of the growth of a writer's mind.

More remarkable still, they embody the development of his formal accomplishment because Puig is never content to tell things as they were—the criterion for much of Latin American fiction for so many years—but always aims at rigorous subordination of the data from his memory to an esthetic code…. Weakly apparent in Rita Hayworth, the imposition of Puig's esthetic will comes to the fore in Heartbreak Tango and The Buenos Aires Affair, where he invents an exterior skeleton for the soft flesh of his narrative, in the former by shaping the narrative as a magazine or radio serial with a climax in every chapter; in the latter, according to the more rigid requirements of the detective story à la Hitchcock. This is not to say that Puig writes serials or detective stories. Far from it. Rather, he uses those forms as molds to cast his corny, bathetic material in a form displaying a witty, ironic attitude toward that material. The result is that Puig has solved a major problem of all autobiographical subject matter: how to present it as the experience of another so that both writer and reader can have a perspective wider than the egotistical.

The Buenos Aires Affair simultaneously imposes this strict form on the narrative and undermines the form in order to present a doubly ironic picture. Early in his career, Puig began eliminating much that we ordinarily expect in a novel. Not with the tight-lipped intention of Hemingway, who divided writers into the takers-out and the putters-in, but for the expressive voice of the absent, the silent. For example, in Rita Hayworth's fourth chapter, there is a striking, extended monologue printed as a telephone conversation where we hear only one voice. A brilliant development of Strindberg's device in The Stronger as well as a borrowing from the conventions of radio and the movies, the monologue is similarly most expressive in its blanks. Carrying this device to the point of vision in The Buenos Aires Affair, Puig writes a detective story that has, in the conventional sense, neither detective nor corpse and whose climax is an anti-climax. Of course there are police investigators in the novel and a murder victim, but they are not central. This further displacement results in a book that conforms to the elegant esthetic of the doughnut: it is what it is precisely for what has been left out, and for the way it has been left out. (pp. 412-13)

Puig presents us with the case of two people who have achieved careers in the urban world only dreamed of by the provincial, unsuccessful characters in his previous work. Gladys and Leopoldo, however, lead lives which take no substance from their success because both, like those other characters, are still victims of the myth of the weak woman and the strong man.

The complex metaphor of the essential void in these lives—typified by Gladys's missing eye—surrounded by an inappropriate abundance—emblematized in Leopoldo's oversize penis—is everywhere evident in the novel. The neutral, often didactic narrator is attentive to all the things the characters don't see, the people they don't meet, the newspapers they read without paying attention. Puig's constant attention to what is lacking or unnoticed recalls films where the camera often shows more of a scene than the actors could be aware of and thus fits in nicely with the epigraphs for his chapters, all of which are taken from sentimental movies and supply the everpresent but invisible romantic ethos of the book.

No mere parody then, these epigraphs show Puig's further opening up to the social conditioning of his characters. Similarly, there is an off-center attention to the political envelope of the fiction notably in a serving woman's grief over the ousting of Peron. In this respect, Puig has taken major strides toward integrating the individual motivation of his characters with the political and economic tensions informing them. What was implicit social criticism in the previous novels here comes to be explicit in the telling of the story but without any recourse to engagé or agit-prop prose.

The balance between presenting a unified picture of the world these people live in (and create) and a mere talking about the world is preserved through the reserve of the narrator's voice, which is mannered in its neutrality. For example, when Gladys is masturbating, we get the substance of her fantasy in the text proper—in a diction appropriate to her mind—and we get the gestures in matter-of-fact footnotes…. The full irony of this technique transcends its humorous effect to include the nature of narrative itself.

In such a poised narrative, the diction is, if not everything, then the thing on which everything else depends. The distinction between the narrator's and the characters' voices must be preserved with exquisite delicacy if the book is not to become heavy-handed or confused. For us, the problem is all the more interesting because what we read is a collaboration between Puig and his translator, Susanne Jill Levine, a combination that Puig refers to as an "experimental authorship" that brought off Rita Hayworth and Heartbreak Tango with grace and wit. But in The Buenos Aires Affair, where the risks are more subtle, the English text frequently goes flat. (pp. 413-14)