FICTION

HOW TO LEAVE A COUNTRY by Cris Mazza (Coffee House Press: $11.95 paper; 179 pp.) This is one of those novels that has to be taken on faith. It’s puzzling, surrealistic, painfully clear in individual scenes but ambiguous as a totality. Yet because the author, San Pedro’s Cris Mazza, seems to know what she’s doing, because talent jumps off her like an overcharge of electricity--”How to Leave a Country” won the PEN Nelson Algren Award while still in manuscript--we can muster the faith to read on.

The narrator is a painter named Tara who lives with a sculptor named Phelan. For unexplained reasons, she remembers nothing about her own past but everything about his. The only story she can tell is the story of Phelan’s life--as an orphan adopted by a large Italian-American family, as a chess prodigy, as a nursing-home attendant and, finally, as an artist living in bohemian digs in Brazil and coming unraveled after a series of grotesque sexual misadventures.

We read harrowing and comic scenes about parents and children, about people and animals, about creators and their creations--scenes in which young Phelan is frustrated in his desire to impose order on the world, checkmate uncertainty, organize love, arrest death--all in order to find out what happened to Tara. Later our questions change. Does Tara exist at all, outside of Phelan’s mind? Is she a person or a work of art, or a symbol of artistic failure? Are the two of them merely the dialogue that every human soul carries on with itself?

Rather admirably, Mazza refuses to clarify, to give in to realism or allegory. She prefers to let the ripples of her puzzle carry us into the murk at the edge of the pool, overhung with grass, where “clawed frogs” lurk. And to stir us with those lyrical, savage scenes, such as at the nursing home where Phelan, who never knew his own father, battles to halt a 93-year-old man’s slide into senility and assaults the elderly son who, disgusted by the incontinent, babbling thing in the bed before him, is walking out forever.