A Metaphor for Guatemala : THE LONG NIGHT OF WHITE CHICKENS <i> By Francisco Goldman</i> , <i> (Atlantic Monthly Press: $21.95; 450 pp.) </i>

It takes one’s breath away when a new talent bursts on the scene and lives up to its billing. The advance promo for “The Long Night of White Chickens”--”best first novel I’ve ever published,” trumpets its publisher--is matched by the author’s wordless swagger: Move aside, Jay McInerney, here’s GOLDMAN!

This is McInerney in Garcia Marquez country; more accurately, in Miguel Angel Asturias country, but who reads Guatemala’s Nobel laureate? The setting is Guatemala City. The schizzy, sexy heroine, Flor de Mayo, is a lower-class mestiza rumored to be running a baby-selling racket. The protagonist, Roger, is himself a cocky mixed-breed of Guatemalan Catholic and Boston Jewish parents.

The drug that pervades this story isn’t coke, hash or sex--although these are all in evidence--but an endemic violence so horrendous and rooted in the novel’s landscape that it overshadows the richly conceived characters and becomes the protagonist. (Having grown up in Guatemala, I find this story hauntingly familiar; even the electric train I lusted after as a boy is here, hypnotically circling the window of Roger’s uncle’s toy store.)

Several recurrent Guatemalan themes are given a fresh lease by Goldman. Celso Batres, the handsome newspaper publisher and presidential aspirant, is modeled on the grandson of Guatemala’s premier newspaperman, Clemente Marroquin Rojas, who was murdered on the dictator’s orders. Roger’s best friend, Moya, is recognizable as Julio Godoy, the dashing and brilliant young journalist who was forced to flee Guatemala after he exposed corruption in high places. Roger’s mother, Mirabel, is the romantic daughter of an upper-class criollo family with an iron-willed abuelita (grandmother) and a grandfather who periodically goes mad, singing entire Verdi operas by heart and squandering the family fortune on his slutty mistress. On the other side of the coin is Roger’s father, Ira, a Jewish retired policeman from a suburb in Boston where Roger grew up sharing his passion for Harvard football.

But above all, “The Long Night of White Chickens” is the story of Flor de Mayo, the provincial orphan girl adopted by Mirabel and Ira as a part-time maid and companion to little Roger. Dark-eyed, slender and alluring, Flor makes an indelible impact on Roger--as have generations of Guatemalan nannies on their tender masters--beguiling him with her sensuality and her secretive, worldly-wise ways.

Flor attempts bravely to bury her troubled past (her father was decapitated by a farmer when he tried to steal some chickens) by enrolling in a suburban Boston grammar school when she is past 12. By dint of sheer will, Flor completes high school and goes on to graduate from Wellesley College.

But old habits of self-destructiveness die hard; “Guatemala,” she writes Roger, “is bottomless grief in a demitasse.” Flor antagonizes Mirabel and disappoints Ira--who loved her as if she were his own daughter--when she threatens to marry a long-haired Cuban drifter and waste her brilliant opportunities.

Flor eventually returns to Guatemala, where she becomes head of an orphan-adoption agency patronized by wealthy Americans and Europeans. She also takes up with a succession of lovers who live on the cutting edge of Guatemala’s treacherous public arena, among them Roger’s old buddy Moya and--rumor has it--Moya’s employer, the handsome and ambitious Celso Batres. Shortly after Flor’s agency places a small Indian girl with a wealthy European couple, Flor is murdered.

The bulk of the novel--what Roger calls his “main assignment”--comprises his efforts to come to grips with Flor’s contradictory nature and to make sense of her terrible end. The story of Flor de Mayo, Roger learns, is the story of Guatemala, and what a fecund metaphor this turns out to be!

Roger’s own bedeviled dualities and contradictions--and those of his friend Moya--get all wound up with the search for Flor’s murderer, and for a credible rationalization of her erratic behavior. A nursemaid accuses Flor of running an illicit “fattening house” for babies to be sold abroad--a lucrative contraband that has grown rampant in Guatemala. Malicious gossip, sex and the unending war between the military and the leftist insurgents fuel the mystery of Flor’s years in Guatemala, of her secret liaisons and her gruesome end.

Roger becomes obsessed, not only with clearing Flor de Mayo’s name but also with exonerating his friend Moya, who became Flor’s lover shortly before she was killed and who might have acted as an unwitting accomplice. (The Moya/Mayo acronym plays rather cutely on the linkage.) This candescent material plumbs the lower depths of Guatemala, and Goldman pulls together the threads of the story brilliantly, moving back and forth in time like a nimble Mayan weaver creating an elaborate huipil.

As the story unfolds, the sections narrated by Roger and by the less-than-omniscient narrator become so interwoven that the line between protagonist and storyteller attenuates and all but disappears. (“I can be a very romantic and self-deluding person,” Roger confesses, evidently speaking for both himself and the narrator.)

At one point, Goldman steps out of the narrative to confront his old schoolmate Moya/Godoy, who has heedlessly bragged of his affair with Flor. Did he know, the narrator asks repeatedly, that Celso Batres was making love to Flor? More than a friendship is at stake here; the narrator’s sanity hangs in the balance. And why not? Guatemala’s violence has cut down far larger and sturdier spirits than Flor’s, Roger’s, Moya’s, or Celso Batres’ for that matter. “Have I ever just come right out and said,” Roger/Goldman asks near the end of the book, “that this is an unbelievably sick and evil place? But that so much of it seems to happen with a certain genius, leaving behind almost nothing but invisibility and silence?”

Because this is Guatemala, Flor’s murderer will never be known, any more than we will ever discover the authors responsible for the 40,000 “disappeared” and unaccounted for over the past 30 years, not to mention the 100,000 or so Guatemalans known to have been assassinated by the military.

The best Roger can hope for is the assurance that Guatemala had not corrupted Flor altogether, as it has hundreds of other bright, educated compatriots of hers who acted with the best of intentions. Still, the novel leaves behind too many unanswered questions.

Roger is hardly an existential hero for our times. In his obsessive search for Flor’s murderer, he is a harsh judge of others and yet can be stubbornly opaque about his own motivations. He belittles Moya: “His mind is not so original; more than occasionally his vanity, his highest hopes, his embarrassing certainties were overruled by his suspicions.” Of course, Roger is really talking about himself, and of his macho pique that his old friend and rival Moya had taken his longed-for place in Flor’s bed, if not in her affections.

This blind spot hints at what may be the novel’s largest shortcoming. Given the narrative’s open-endedness, the real missing character here is a disciplined editor, who might have blue-penciled dozens of tangential anecdotes, superfluous sexual encounters and “magic realist” passages. Were they retained to bolster the book’s claim to Marquezian stature? They are hardly necessary. Flor de Mayo is the heart and soul of this fine novel, and her story would have packed a more powerful wallop at a lean 300 pages than it does at an overinflated 450.