Through a Glass, Starkly : TROPICAL NIGHT FALLING, <i> By Manuel Puig (Simon & Schuster: $19; 189 pp.)</i>

Suzanne Jill Levine, whose admirable translations long ago placed readers of serious fiction in her debt, brings us Manuel Puig’s pungent and saddening posthumously published “Tropical Night Falling.” A good deal of the sadness of this event resides in the novel’s not living up to its predecessors.

Puig received perhaps his largest attention when his “Kiss of the Spider Woman” became a celebrated film. But he had long been admired, before that film’s release, by the readers of his other novels--there are seven in all--including “Heartbreak Tango” and “Betrayed by Rita Hayworth.”

Hallmarks of Puig’s work include an eerie feeling of alienation. Born in Argentina, he lived in exile after Peron returned to power; Mexico, Brazil and the United States were substitutes for his homeland. Not surprisingly, emotional relationships in Puig’s fiction are portrayed politically. His characters often express themselves in violent sexuality and through metaphors (such as films) that remove them from direct emotional relationships. A predatory cruelty is threaded through the novels, as well as an impulse to generosity; the humor of his fiction is dark.

In “Tropical Night Falling,” two sisters, who have exiled themselves in Rio, talk. Their conversations--the heart of the novel--often have a disembodied quality, and consist essentially of gossip and sad reminiscence. Luci and Nidia remember the dead and speculate on the living. In their old age, they recall youth; they tell stories, recite their feelings and, well, maunder. There are dead children, relatives too far away for comfort, recollections of high drama.

But the recollections themselves are far from dramatic, and what the reader must contend with for most of the novel is headless, faceless, very undramatic gossip. We are eavesdroppers, and this is the sort of thing we hear:

“Nidia, just this minute I feel a yen for some bread pudding.”

“Luci, how happy we were then and we didn’t even know it.”

“They were good years and you lived them. They can’t take that away from you, as the saying goes.”

“Luci, if it stops raining today let’s go to that shoe store again, come on.”

“The man said they were getting in the same style in brown, but not until next week.”

We watch as we might through a one-way glass placed against the wall of a hotel room, but without the shame and compulsion that might drive us to that glass.

Gradually, we come to learn that one of the sisters has befriended a local psychiatrist, and we overhear that the psychiatrist, alone and sad, has met a man, also alone and sad, and that they have begun an erratic love affair that ends unhappily. It involves a number of heartbreaks and even death, but the events are reduced by the novel’s structure to gossip, and thus it is difficult to be moved by either the moments of revelation or the events themselves.

The speakers--the gossips--are removed from the action. The reader is further removed. Puig’s inclusion of newspaper articles, letters, telephone calls and even an airline’s report on its service serves to distance the reader even further. And so love, death, prostitution, victimization all are made abstract. We speculate on contemporary Brazil and on age and death and lost love.

Still, it is Puig. There are his signatures: lovers who become predator and victim, a woman’s realization that the man she has nursed back to psychic health now feels physically sick when she makes love to him. There are lovely lines: “It’s just that the walls are bad for me, Luci, they don’t let me breathe.” And when the sisters are separated and must correspond, the illness of one, and its results, create an ironic sadness to which we can respond because of our long acquaintance with these women.

And always, woven into the chattiness of the sisters, like passing comments on the weather, are recollections of life under fascist rule. Puig’s career will continue to matter because he so memorably created erotic relationships that mirror the toilings of the brutal state bestride its victims.