FICTION

LANGUAGE IN THE BLOOD by Kent Nelson (Gibbs Smith: $18.95; 251 pp.) About a quarter of this novel is a thriller about Guatemalan refugees being smuggled into the Southwestern United States. The other three-quarters is a subtle, psychological story about some Americans who help with the smuggling. Kent Nelson has done an admirable job here, but readers may wish the proportions were reversed.

Narrator Scott Talmedge leads bird-watching tours. A bird guide, he says, “had to pay attention to all the signs in the natural world. He had to see everything clearly, without imagining.” But this ability hasn’t carried over into personal relations. Talmedge’s wife has left him to investigate atrocities in Central America; he suspects an old college friend, Tilghman Myre, also an activist, of alienating her affections.

Offered a university teaching post in Tucson, Talmedge accepts reluctantly, knowing he will meet Myre there. But the Myre he meets confounds his expectations. Abrupt, mysterious, tormented, heroic, Myre teases Talmedge out of his jealous funk and dares him to drop the binoculars of the professional spectator.

At the climax--a tragic border-crossing attempt--the faces of injured, frightened Guatemalan children make Talmedge forget his previous concerns. But it’s those concerns that constitute most of the novel, even though Talmedge is the least interesting character in it. He seems too ordinary even to need the redemption that Nelson insists on giving him. The poetic Arizona landscapes, the bird lore, the sensitive descriptions of the three women the two men are involved with--none of this is trivial, but the brush with political terror blows it away.