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BY TOM LeCLAIR | "Say what?"

So says again and again Nadine "Mosquito" Johnson -- truck driver, Bud Light drinker, TV documentary watcher and narrator of Gayl Jones' novel "Mosquito" -- as she listens to the diatribes of Delgadina, an intellectual Chicana bartender in Texas City; to the polemics of Ray, a polymath black activist; to the advice of childhood friend Monkey Bread, now a bookish assistant to a Hollywood star; and to the conversations of other African-Americans whose ideas the high school-educated Mosquito doesn't understand. She also doesn't fully understand these characters' actions. Her eventual lover Ray may or may not be a priest. He and Delgadina may have manipulated Mosquito into assisting a new Underground Railroad that smuggles refugees from Latin America.

"Mosquito" is a midlife Bildungsroman that Mosquito's tutors try to make into a Künstlerroman -- a novel of the artist's development -- as they tell her what kind of book to narrate. Maybe it's "Don Quixote" from Sancho's point of view or a border-town "Tristram Shandy"; perhaps it's an improvisational jazz autobiography or trickster satire; probably it's an archive of the Daughters of Nzingha (the African woman warrior), because "Mosquito" includes the group's newsletters, poems, letters -- and, the author helpfully notes, a play by her mother, Lucille Jones.

These models discourage plot and welcome everything else. Jones refers to the history of blacks in Mexico and to her own family; alludes to real and invented African-American novelists from Ralph Ellison to her own creation, Amanda Wordlaw; discusses languages that Mosquito doesn't speak but seems to understand; reports reminiscences from Mosquito's childhood in Kentucky; retells dreams and throws in Delgadina's cantina sink while she's at it.

At first Jones' main character has the appeal of Huck Finn, fresh talk from a naive, good-hearted outsider. But after 50 pages and with little narrative momentum, her "confabulatory" charm wears off and "Mosquito" reads like 2,000 pages of Gertrude Stein's "Melanctha," aggressively digressive, frequently vapid and stupefyingly repetitive.

Mosquito says, "You can't trust everybody with every story. You can't trust people with every story. You don't tell everybody every story. Even them stories that is satires ain't to be told to just everybody. You don't even tell everybody everything in the same story."

Say what?

Jones -- famously reclusive, particularly since witnessing the death of her mentally unstable husband in a February 1998 confrontation with police -- has Mosquito explain this kind of discourse while commenting on a minor character who "recontextualizes the subject matter of Elvis to create a new storytelling form whose express purpose it seems is to insult the intelligence." In her academic study of oral narration, "Liberating Voices," Jones advocates replacing "intelligence" with affect and wisdom. She used similar yarning methods in "The Healing." I thought that book should have won the National Book Award last year, but "Mosquito" is twice as long, Mosquito is half as articulate as Jones' earlier narrator and the simulation of orality is now constricting rather than liberating.

I'm not arguing with the multiethnic, multiracial, multiclass and gender perspectives of "Mosquito." They deserve more affecting, wiser, less self-promoting treatment. Jones creates interesting characters and pressing situations in a charged landscape, then maddeningly occludes them all with the hyper-realism of Mosquito's meandering and maundering voice. We hear little from the refugees. Instead, we get pages and pages of second-hand opinions about colonialism. Then paragraphs of implausible literary commentary explaining why these opinions should be in this book. Ostensibly the oral history of Mosquito's inquisitive "I," "Mosquito" turns out to be an echo chamber where Gayl Jones can say "me, me, me."
SALON | Jan. 12, 1999

Tom LeClair is the author of "The Art of Excess," a book of criticism, and "Passing Off," a novel. He teaches at the University of Cincinnati.

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R E L A T E D_.S A L O N_.S T O R I E S

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