Sleepwalk Through Senegal : I GET ON THE BUS<i> by Reginald McKnight (Little Brown: $17.95; 296 pp.) </i>

When Reginald McKnight’s story collection, “Moustapha’s Eclipse,” won the 1988 Drue Heinz Literature Prize, Margaret Atwood, chair of the award panel, cited McKnight’s fiction for “an enviable verbal panache, a wacky inventiveness and, from time to time, a directness and honesty that makes you squirm. The writer’s focus is on black experience, in both America and Africa, but he brings to it his own quirkiness, his own distinctive voice.”

Some of these writerly virtues are evident in McKnight’s first outing as a novelist. “I Get on the Bus” is the funny, surreal, frustrating and at times intentionally confusing story about a black Peace Corps worker, Evan Norris, struggling with insanity, self-loathing and the supernatural in modern-day Senegal. To a degree, the story seems inspired by the year McKnight spent teaching and writing in Senegal, where, as he reported in a 1989 interview, he suffered “lengthy bouts with malaria, hepatitis and culture shock that drained me of much desire to do any significant research.”

So it is with Evan Norris, “a perpetual student, a perpetual wanderer, a habitual quitter,” who is in the throes of vision-blurring headaches and malarial hallucinations when the novel opens. Norris, however, refuses to take medication because he enjoys and is “fascinated by this illness,” which is, a reader quickly comes to see, an existential metaphor for his alienation from his family and girlfriend. (“Love is work,” Norris confesses. “I am the Stepin Fetchit of love.”) After a stint in the Navy, he has come to Africa to escape parents who belong to Colorado’s black bourgeoisie, and his Afrocentric lover and psychiatrist, Wanda Wright, who is “terminally middle-class, hopelessly careful and controlled,” and regards him as someone who needs reforming.

But before the novel is 16 pages old, Norris has murdered--or at least believes he’s killed--a legless beggar who tries to mug him in Dakar. For Norris and the reader, the reality of this event is never clear, since it occurs on a night that is beautifully described as “purring velvet black” and when he is “mad with pain.”

He awakens from this nightmarish “sleepwalk through Africa” in the nearby village of N’Gor, and discovers that a one-eyed marabou (sorcerer) named Gueye, who looks like “a mixture of Mahatma Gandhi and a horror-picture ghoul,” has taken him in. Why Gueye does this, Norris doesn’t know, but he quickly falls in love with Gueye’s daughter, Aminata, a student at Georgetown University. In contrast to Wanda, she is presented as closer to the earth and wiser than Norris. When he blunderingly asks, “Is your father a powerful marabou , Ami?,” her memorable reply is, “If your father were a dentist, what would you think if I asked you if he was a powerful dentist? . . . You Americans make me sick with the way you always assume that Africa is full of witch doctors and voodoo priestesses.”

Yet despite Aminata’s debunking of stereotypes about Africa when she first meets Norris, dead lizards begin turning up in his shower and backpack. A bound chicken is placed in his room. His headaches and hallucinations continue. His behavior becomes more irrational. Members of the Gueye family behave mysteriously with him. Little by little, he learns his sickness may be more supernatural than physical, that the marabou has been trying to protect him from a “jinn,” a demon sent to destroy him by an enemy. “And if you can’t make this man call back the jinn, Evan,” says Aminata, “you may have to kill him. That is our ancient science.”

Sad to say, it is at this point that McKnight’s complicated plot becomes even more convoluted, indicating the lack of control frequently seen in first novels. He pads out portions of the book with Norris’ letters to Wanda (who never appears on stage); his chapters, which average nine pages, suggest a division that is arbitrary and whimsical, not dramatic, and, perhaps worst of all, the sensitivity toward African culture at the beginning gives way to voodoo melodrama, thin characterization and a story line that McKnight never manages to coax into clarity.

Norris learns that Aminata and her ex-fiance, Lamont Samb, want him to kill another black American, Africa Mamadou Ford, a free-wheeling hustler who landed years before in Senegal. Ford, they say, fell in love with Aminata and pursued her right into her bedroom; this intrusion caused her mother to die of a heart attack. Lamont confesses that he saw Norris kill the beggar in Dakar. Thus, they think it fitting for one black American--especially one possessed by a demon--to eliminate another. Norris also is told this act of revenge for them will be his “bride-price” for Aminata.

Is this McKnight’s story? Neither he nor Norris seems sure. The novel gives, then immediately takes back, basic information. For example, Africa Mamadou Ford insists that Gueye killed his wife. And it is never certain that Lamont actually saw Norris kill the beggar, or if Aminata simply heard Norris describe this event in his sleep when he first arrived in N’Gor. By the novel’s end, no question raised, complicated or contradicted by the action has been answered.

Unhappily, one must conclude that, despite its occasional poetry and wit, “I Get on the Bus” fails dismally as a novel. However, given McKnight’s talent, one also must hope he will return once again to this genre.