When a Myth Is as Good as a Mile : ALMANAC OF THE DEAD, <i> By Leslie Marmon Silko (Simon & Schuster: $25; 716 pp.)</i>

The longer my own novels get, the more I sympathize with novelists writing blockbusters, and I do so because the massive novel models itself not on the vast universe, our huge planet, our big continents, but on the grandiose behavior of the Creator of all things. There is surely something godlike in concocting “Remembrance of Things Past” or “Finnegans Wake” that you might feel in only a minor way if concocting “Death in Venice” or “Candide.” E. M. Forster must have felt this when he spoke of some enormous thing looming down the road, “a solid mass ahead,” though he himself never attempted the mega-novel.

Leslie Marmon Silko attempts it. In her second novel (after “Ceremony” in 1977, which won her the double-edged accolade “the most accomplished Indian writer of her generation”), she hauls together tectonic plates called America, Mexico, Africa, “The Fifth World,” and concludes with a homemade synthesis entitled “One World, Many Tribes.” She creates with a free, impassioned hand, keenly aware of terrain, history and that bedeviling paradox known as the past in the present. Her personages are American Indians, loaded down with legend that affects them much more than the common-sense mercantile wisdom of so-called Western civilization. Ancient and modern jostle together.

Take the character Menardo, proud owner of a new bulletproof vest, the owner’s manual of which is his bedside book. The president of Universal Insurance, Menardo gets helpful marksmen to test the vest; he dies of a flaw in the weave. As flies to wanton boys are these characters to themselves, always wondering how far a modern magic--a Mercedes, a skyscraper, an electric chair, a Tucson vacation home--can be pushed, but just as ready to listen to “macaw beings” and to heed a dream about a rattler on an asphalt highway in the moonlight. Silko makes her novel a spirited mix of boundless primitive feeling and sophisticated urban sloth.

The problem with the book is that Silko deals more graphically with myth than with folks. Her myth remains unforgettable, whereas her characters--too many, introduced too soon and then abandoned for long stretches--remain invisible and forgettable. There are five on the first page, and they keep on coming at a fast clip for the rest of the book. It’s almost as if their expendability were the point, their virtual interchangeability contrasted with the personae, gargoyles, incubuses, demons and revenants of another dimension altogether. In Silko’s world, abstractions are less abstract than the people; pain, for instance, is “a jaguar that devoured a human life from the inside out. It left behind only the skin and bones and hair.”

I found myself peering back, wondering who was who, only to remember fragments that, while vivid and energetic, didn’t help me in my belated quest for a family tree. There was the sadistic De Guzman, ancient invader of Sonora, making lampshades from human skin and seating Indian women on pointed sticks, then weighing them down with silver. I remembered Maximilian and Charlotte, emperor and empress of Mexico, he collecting insects and servant girls, she “ridding castles of spiders and vermin.” These legendary or fabulous beings have more bite, more impact, more staying power, than Silko’s imaginary “real” characters, perhaps because at heart she’s more attuned to myth and ceremony, things not so much diurnal and ephemeral as hallowed, ripe.

Here is an excellent work of myth and a second-rate novel, full of lacunae because there are just too many people in it. As it is, the most powerful material in the novel is what happens to old Lecha’s almanac of the dead, a magical book inscribed on sheets made from horse stomachs (“the little half-moon marks were places the stomach worms had chewed”). Three young girls and a boy carry the almanac north, little knowing that the tale of their march is already included in the almanac itself. After many weeks, lest they starve, they suck and nibble at the edges of the horse-gut pages, eventually enriching a stew with a whole page (the letters fly away like small birds). This is close to Indian myth, but far from downtown Tucson and the story of the bulletproof vest.

Silko’s own sensibility is to blame. It prefers to amass magical contortions while the more humdrum part of her stacks up simple declarative sentences modeled on the rough-hewn part of the Hemingway canon. The whole book could have been done with half a dozen characters, each endowed with enough heft and depth to balance the myth.

Silko does not interest herself much in psychology, in the unsaid word, the thought uncompleted, the murmur lost. Death and disrespect come moving through the brutal, narcotized world she likes to deal with, and I begin to wonder if the disjointed, non-cumulative nature of her enormous book represents the shattered mind of an atavist or comes about because half a dozen disparate novellas have been rammed together here. There is an infinite variety of greasy detritus, from sex malls to abortion movies, from organ transplants to cocaine shipments made by balloon. Silko’s desert wasteland aches with pain and deprivation, and her sufferers hate all others who suffer. What keeps you reading is the hum of magic within the arid passacaglia.