Lost in the Jungle : THE GEOGRAPHY OF DESIRE <i> by Robert Boswell; (Alfred A. Knopf: $18.95; 320 pp.; 0-394-57690-X) </i>

I very much wanted to like this ambitious novel by a good writer, whose previous fiction has garnered deserving praise. “The Geography of Desire” showcases Robert Boswell’s virtuosity as a phrasemaker and storyteller, but the book’s message is unfortunately skewed by a Latin setting too rarefied to be believed.

I happen to have read “Geography of Desire” in a northern Honduran coastal town similar to the one described in the novel, which is set in the backwaters of a country like Nicaragua around the mid-’70s. Boswell deliberately blurs his coordinates in order to highlight his main theme: the hero’s attempt to reconcile his polymorphous desires with personal authenticity. The coastal resort of La Boca is portrayed as a sultry paradise menaced by the gathering revolution. All its residents, adolescents included, speak a stage dialogue spotted with epigrams and elliptic phrases. They move in a kind of liquid amber, as if they were already living in memory. As a movie, “Geography of Desire” would fall somewhere between “Mosquito Coast” and “Night of the Iguana.” But it has neither the raw, narrative force of Theroux’s novel, nor the densely textured atmosphere of Tennessee Williams’ plays.

Leon, the expatriate protagonist, is served up as a post-modernist homme moyen sensuel who seeks redemption by plotting accurately the latitudes and longitudes of his desires. In the most stunning scene of the novel, Leon’s jilted young lover, Lourdes, shouts in despair,

“Is it geography. I’ve studied the arrangement of the continents, the prevailing winds, the ocean currents . . . I can name you the layers of the sky . . .” Lourdes then races naked through the jungle, where she rapes her adoring childhood admirer, Benjamin. Unappeased, Lourdes spends the night with a stranded gringo backpacker. In the morning she beats him unconscious, makes off with his clothes and his hunting knife and returns to town to murder her rival, beautiful Pilar, whom she baselessly accuses of becoming pregnant to steal Leon away from her.

Pilar, a Marxist revolutionary who loves Leon without condition, aspires to a small refuge of lucid sensuality between the “abyss of mindless emotion” and “the wasteland of heartless intellect.” For all her ill-starred attractiveness, Boswell’s Pilar finally seems as self-consciously invented as Hemingway’s counterpart in “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” who waits for the earth to move when she makes love with Robert Jordan. A more successful portrait is that of Leon’s friend, the storyteller Ramon, who uncovers the miraculous hidden within the ordinary. Ramon’s gift deserts him when he unleashes the monster of Lourdes’ jealousy out of a blind obsession with assuring a better future for his son.

The metaphor linking inner and outer geographies is brilliantly conceived, but the novel is damagingly divorced from the reality of the world it portrays. Its political and social concerns are poorly clothed abstractions, and the narrative and dialogue are encrusted with aphorisms that please the ear but create a hard, alienating surface. La Boca itself, for all its exotic locale, lacks the harsh colors and subtly corrupt atmosphere of Central America’s Caribbean coast.

In my Honduran counterpart to La Boca, Eros and revolution are similarly wedded into the visible and invisible landscape, but conversation centers on the depletion of lobster and shrimp stocks in the ocean, and the disappearing mahogany forests as the sawmills move ever closer to the coast. The curious hammetism of La Boca induces a corresponding detachment in the reader, rather than the timeless universality the novel intends. Too many of the secondary characters in “Geography of Desire” are pale borrowings from Garcia Marquez and other Latin novelists, or manipulated projections of Leon’s and the author’s erotic preoccupation. The gnomic platitudes of the dying revolutionary, Samuel, are simply preposterous.

The thicket which traps sounds and shadows from the dinosaur age as well as the lovemaking of La Boca’s recent ancestors is a deft magic realist touch but it serves no illuminating purpose to the main theme. The reappearing terodactyl takes on significance only when it casts a shadow larger than that of the airplane about to bomb La Boca. Lourdes’ crime of passion is the most powerful scene in the book, and one the residents of my Honduran village would find instantly credible, as they hear or read about similar stories every week.

The narrator’s redemption of Leon after a week of bereavement, and his emergence from near drowning in the ocean as a resurrected “good man”, comes across not only as a rigged ending, but as simply irrelevant. What is most convincing about Leon is his search for an honest connectedness, a continuity of feeling, in the wake of his marital failures. In the end, he is defeated by the two-headed beast of his desire which cannot choose between the loving Pilar and the volcanic Lourdes, and he proves incapable of loving either one. The shapes of Leon’s desire cannot fill the larger shapes of his loneliness, and so they remain unredeemed.

Lourdes’ mother’s verdict on Leon may serve this novel equally well: “He sincerely desires to be good. That is often the most dangerous kind of person.” And, she might have added, the most seductive of novelists’ footfalls.