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LUSH LANGUAGE : ISLAND FEVER : SWIMMING IN THE VOLCANO, <i> By Bob Shacochis (Scribner’s: $22; 513 pp.)</i>

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<i> Lochte's most recent novel, "Blue Bayou," is due out in paperback this summer</i>

After two prize-winning short story collections--”Easy in the Islands” (American Book Award) and “The Next New World” (Prix de Rome)--Bob Shacochis has moved on to the novel form. And he has done it in a big way. Just as the book’s protagonist, economist Mitchell Wilson, grows weary trying to stay afloat in the thick, murky water gathered in a Caribbean volcano’s crater, the reader may experience a bit of exhaustion while paddling toward the far shore of this long, dense narrative (the first of a planned trilogy, yet). But, as Mitchell discovers, the experience is worth the effort.

Shacochis, that rare combination of stylist and storyteller of serious intent, transports us to the fictional island of St. Catherine in the mid-1970s. We’re on the cusp of the new world--1960s rebelliousness has begun to settle into the conservatism of the ‘70s--and it is, like Graham Greeneland, a dark, mysterious place capable of claiming lives and trying souls. No longer the unspoiled paradise, it nonetheless draws newcomers like a magnet.

In a typical passage, Shacochis expounds on the lure of the latter-day tropics. “Impure and trodden though it may be, the world between Cancer and Capricorn was remote enough to still have its hinterland attraction, that psychic glint and sparkle in the smoky rags of its wilderness for pioneers born belatedly into the Aquarian Age. For what passed in the 20th Century as frontiersmen: would-be individualists rebelling against the vague brutalities of middle-class lives; centurions from the suburbs, the off-shore mavericks, the missionaries of industry and guardians of the endangered thing; the mall culture fugitives, the explorers of psychoactivity; the Marco Polos of consumerism and the Magellans of avarice; the cinema bwanas, the pilgrims of strangeness, the glory dreamers--all the restless souls who were going to jump right out of their skin unless they moved out in the direction of the Equator, latitude zero, a band of the world that offered opportunities of the absolute--absolute success, absolute failure, absolute depravity. They came to it not as they would have in the past, as men encountering an enslaved virgin who would acquiesce to rough treatment, but as courtiers trying to win the attention of a harridan widow, a mauled-over bitch who had inherited the broken kingdoms of her ancestors. Either way, you could hardly call it romance.”

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The 27-year-old Wilson has come to St. Catherine to provide the emerging government with his agrarian expertise. As was the case with others of his generation, his altruistic hopes have been dampened by an exposure to post-college reality. He seems to be biding his time, trying to get a fix on the Byzantine local politics, hanging out with friends. The latter include young expatriates such as the genial hotel-owner Tillman Hyde (the hero of the author’s short story “Easy in the Islands”) and the big-hearted Kansas-born Peace Corps teacher Sally, as well as locals such as the ebullient car-fancier Isaac, and Saconi, Sally’s lover, a respected, rebellious reggae musician.

In the book’s opening chapter, Wilson’s busy if vaguely dissatisfied existence is shaken by two surprises. The first is a letter announcing the arrival of Johanna Woods, the woman who broke his heart (and who may have been responsible for his decision to remove himself to the tropics). Johanna, or Johnnie as she likes to be called, is a crash course in self-indulgence. She is, as Wilson has learned the hard way, trouble. But even he has not anticipated the degree of trouble she’s bringing on the run from a violent husband and the law and carrying stolen money and drugs.

The other shock to Wilson’s system is the discovery, on the way to the airport to collect Johnnie, that Isaac has naively substituted coconut oil for brake fluid in his beloved ancient taxi, resulting in a breath-taking out-of-control descent down a mountainside. The pell-mell plunge is described in a woozy, almost slapstick manner, a clever literary deception, considering that one of its consequences is to cast both Isaac and Wilson into the deep, treacherous waters of island politics. This event will also profoundly affect just about every other character in the novel.

“Swimming” is rich in incident and sense of place. And rich in detail. Thanks to his vivid, unblinking depiction, St. Catherine emerges as real as, and perhaps more real than, any existing Antilles isle. And the patois of its people, as concocted by Shacochis, has just the right sound. If the author skimps on anything, it is in the delineation of some of his characters. Johnnie, in particular, seems to be little more than that film noir favorite, the bad woman on the run (albeit with a post-flower-child spin), whose only purpose is to give the hero hell. And Wilson’s island paramour, Josephine, with her candle-lit bedroom and sweet young son, is scarcely more original.

But these minor flaws are more than overwhelmed by the spellbinding power of Shacochis’ prose and the beauty and rhythms of his poetic style. Yes, his punctilious descriptions slow down the action to the point where one may be tempted to skip ahead. But what a mistake it would be to risk overlooking a passage like this: “A nimbus of seaspray hung over their heads, like dawn itself in colloidal suspension, ready to burst in their faces. The next installment of light showed them the lowness of the paling clouds, the sootiness of their heavenly fabric, loose and ragged, coming unstuffed. Now it was clear they’d be cheated out of a famous sunset, but if the lighting remained so otherworldly, no one was going to complain.”

No complaints here, either.

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