BOOK REVIEW : An Ambiguous Tale of Corrupted Mexico : ECLIPSE FEVER, <i> by Walter Abish</i> , Alfred A. Knopf $23, 335 pages

Here and there in “Eclipse Fever” there are references to La Malinche, the Aztec woman who supposedly betrayed her people to Cortes and his men. The book makes her the symbol of its deracinated Mexican intelligentsia, supine before the imperialisms of multinational culture and finance, and the corrupt chokehold of the politicians.

Walter Abish’s novel, told with the manicured disquiet of an Antonioni film, portrays corruption under an urbane surface, and a terror that barely shows itself. When Alejandro, the spineless literary critic who figures as one of La Malinche’s epigones becomes briefly enmeshed in the schemes of the political police, his young interrogator cursorily beats him. Upon Alejandro’s release, the interrogator tells Alejandro that he had been his student at the university and had enjoyed his Cervantes course.

Alejandro is involved, in one way or another, in all of the book’s interlocking plots.

One involves Preston Hollier, a shady American millionaire developer who wants to build an elevator up one of Mexico’s historic treasures, the Pyramid of the Sun. Hollier asks Alejandro to use his cultural prestige to write in support of the project. Alejandro becomes entangled, peripherally, with an adulterous affair between an old writer-friend and Hollier’s wife and with Hollier’s illegal effort to buy an ancient manuscript. This results in a murder and in Alejandro’s arrest as part of a politician’s plot to force Hollier into cutting him in on one of his deals.

Alejandro is to conduct a television interview with a famous American novelist named Jurud, who is Jewish but writes penetratingly about WASPs. An amalgam of John Updike and Philip Roth, perhaps; his name, like one or two in the book and like the book itself, is less earthly than inter-galactic. Abish’s Mexico, though rendered in exacting detail, gives us the odd frozen sense that it is made of anti-matter.

To continue the interlockings: Alejandro’s wife, Mercedes, is Jurud’s translator and mistress. At the book’s start, in fact, Alejandro drives her to the airport so she can meet her lover. Just one example of Malinche-like prostration before the foreigner.

And finally, Jurud’s 16-year-old daughter, Bonny, flees her home upon Mercedes’ arrival--she can’t stand her perfume--and begins a disastrous odyssey through California and Mexico, in the course of which she becomes the love-slave of a California Christian fundamentalist. Alejandro gets considerable detailing as a symbol of neocolonial exploitation. His exalted position in the literary Establishment comes almost exclusively from reviewing famous foreign authors. His lineage is mestizo (mixed blood). His father runs the city’s leading European movie theater and dies watching a Bunuel film. When he is about to marry Mercedes, whose wealthy family is from old Spanish stock and despises mestizos, his mother warns him that his fiancee will deprive him of his vitality.

True enough, though Abish’s images of repressed national vitality are too insistent and crude. A number of them involve food.

The story’s intersecting webs, its secrets and conspiracies, its sudden gusts of violence around Alejandro’s haplessly revolving weather vane, are intriguing from time to time, but they never really engage us. They are not, strictly, intended to. Rather, they aim at suggesting the sick weather of our times.

In some ways, “Eclipse Fever” recalls one of Graham Greene’s novels of political conspiracy and existential poison, with a chiaroscuro of ambiguity playing among the characters. There is even that very Greene-like figure, the innocent and abused young wanderer.

Abish does succeed in suggesting the poison of a corrupted culture. But unlike Greene, the figures he uses to play the roles of corrupter, innocent and fool are inert, even at their most strenuously active. Neither Alejandro in his guilt-stricken cultural complexity, nor Mercedes in her flight, nor Hollier in his cold schemes has even a touch of charm, that fictional quality that is as mysterious as original sin.

Bonny, the waif and falling star, ought to touch us, but she doesn’t. “I am the source of my father’s creative imagination,” she tells her California abuser. “Do you realize you’re only making love to a text?” For all its marshaling of the world’s disquiet, reading “Eclipse Fever” is like having a text make love to us.