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T A B L E+T A L K

Blasphemy! Discuss Macmillan/Picador's "Readers Edition" of Ulysses, with its "corrected" spellings, punctuation and grammar in Table Talk.

F E A T U R E

Alienated
The Salon Interview:
Caleb Carr
The author discusses serial killers, murderous moms and growing up terrorized by the Beats (10/06/97)

R E C E N T L Y

My brother: A memoir
By Jamaica Kincaid
Nonfiction
(10/09/97)

As Though I Had Wings
By Chet Baker
Nonfiction
(10/08/97)

Toward the End of Time
By John Updike
Fiction
(10/07/97)

The Tetherballs of Bougainville
By Mark Leyner
Fiction
(10/06/97)

Gorilla Suit
By Bob Paris
Nonfiction
(10/03/97)

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s t o n e C o w b o y

BY MARK JACOBS

SOHO PRESS

FICTION

292 PAGES

BY DAVID BOWMAN | "stone cowboy" is the first novel from Mark Jacobs, an American foreign service officer stationed in Madrid, and what a beauty it is. The book gives no indication of the author's skills in diplomacy, but Jacobs damn sure understands the mechanics of genre in a season when other writers don't seem to have a clue. Our diplomat knows his James M. Cain pacing, his Graham Greene jungle milieu, his Raymond Chandler similes. Furthermore, Jacobs makes the familiar unique with a magic realism that owes more to Carlos Castañeda than Garcia Marquez.

The plot is simple: A "stone cowboy" -- i.e., a stoned-out loser -- named Roger is knocking around Bolivia trying to score enough money to return to Flint, Mich. Outside of La Paz, he runs into a straight-laced American named Agnes who's searching for her lost brother. She has "the voice of a schoolmarm," but she can't speak Spanish. Roger agrees to be her translator, and not out of benevolence -- he plans to steal her passport. Against their will, Roger and Agnes become a demented Nick and Nora Charles of sorts, stuck in a forsaken jungle under the Andes, forced to stomp cocoa leaves into paste for shipment to the "United States of America of the North" (a region later referred to as "Gringolandia").

Jacobs' novel has been released during what might be called the season of the perfect sentence. This is Don DeLillo's September, and the start of James Salter's fall. Jacob's sentences have occasional pizzazz, but basically they only service the scene. But then, our diplomat does construct memorable ones, such as a night when a Scottish-born Bolivian hoists up his grandfather's bagpipes and plays "soulfully" to the nocturnal jungle until the Scot runs out of air and goes "back to drinking."

In addition to boozing, Jacobs hits all the hard-boiled tenets in his Bolivian jungle -- screwing, gunplay, the stone cowboy getting beaten up Philip Marlowe-style by American DEA stormtroopers. That said, Jacobs could have ruined it all with cuteness: Agnes' brother is a magician, a profession nearly impossible to take seriously in a novel. But Jacobs pulls off his magic act 99 percent of the time. The magician brother ("The Mystical Gringo") consorts with a Bolivian cocaine kingpin (an albino one, no less!) who wants to become a full-fledged magician himself -- a quest that coincides with the stone cowboy's desire to go home. In a lyrical finale, after several joes get their brains blown out, Roger literally asks God for deliverance from being a nulled-out noir character. The reader suddenly realizes that "Stone Cowboy" has been a religious novel all along. After all, the book's first sentence is, "Two days before he was released forever from el Panoptico prison, in La Paz, Bolivia, Roger the stone cowboy became aware that he had been talking to God." One suspects Jacobs' second novel will illuminate us as to how hard-boiled the Lord's answer might be.
SALON | Oct. 10, 1997

David Bowman lives in New York. His second novel, "Bunny Modern," will be published in January by Little, Brown.