Homunculus

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY 1 MAY 2000

An aimless, scraggly crowd of hedonistic Americans are bent on living out the Kerouackian dream (or nightmare) south of the border in Wintner's unruly and derivative fifth novel (after The Prophet Pasqual). The characters, far too many to keep track of, have relocated to Mexico, but what they've escaped from exactly isn't quite clear. Meet Charles Blackmore and Tony Drury, failed movie people; Kensho Wannamaker, who hangs with a transient named Cisco, "a man, old style"; and Leanne, an aging beauty with gargantuan breast implants who proved her undying love to her incarcerated boyfriend Wayne by "tattooing her splendiferous peaks with a map of Acapulco running south to just above her crotch." For all these slapdash folks, "work means artistry" and the colony they create in Central Mexico means "snug harbor, where art and life and liquor can live in peace together." But only Marylin Sweeney ever really does something truly artistic; she organizes a film festival. Wintner's high-watt prose doesn't compensate for the book's maddening lack of narrative. Poetic images are strewn about as non sequiturs and no Kerouac magic leads the reader through the maze of musings. Supposedly a "dark comedy of expatriation and overdose," the expats' transgressive exploits--drinking tequila, smoking pot and having sex--are repetitive and incoherent while the book's strength is Wintner's tragicomedic dialogue, with its sharp, angled wit. In this imitation-Bukowski world, everything comes down to this: "Some chuckled. Some dozed. Most dazed."