HOUSE ARREST

An American travel writer is forcibly detained on a Soviet- linked Caribbean island in this fourth novel from Morris—a murky, claustrophobic work that fails to penetrate the depths of the author's previous fiction (most recently, A Mother's Love, 1993). Thirty-six-year-old Maggie Conover's life in Brooklyn is pleasant enough, sturdily constructed around an architect husband and a five-year-old daughter. Still, even after ten years of roaming the world updating a series of travel guides, Maggie's natural restlessness prods her to pack her bags every few months for another trek into the unknown. This time, her trip turns ominous when she's detained at customs upon arrival on an unnamed island. Implying that her detention has to do with the disappearance of Isabel, a local woman whom Maggie befriended on a previous visit, the island officials place the American under house arrest at the pleasant Hotel Espa§a. There, with nothing to do, Maggie has time to reflect on her brief relationship with the missing Isabel, only daughter of the country's despotic leader, nicknamed El Caballo. Fascinated by Isabel's reputation for defying her father, identifying with her desperate desire to flee the closed, poverty-ridden island, and physically attracted by the woman's beauty and grace, sensible Maggie did in fact uncharacteristically risk her own safety by agreeing to ``lose'' her passport and plane ticket so that Isabel could use them to escape. Maggie's act then can be chalked up to infatuation, but her return now is more difficult to understand. In any case, once she has had leisure to relive her quasi-erotic experience, she's abruptly released—to go back to her family a grateful and perhaps wiser woman. Flat descriptions of dusty roads and crumbling villas alternate with the purple prose of Isabel's dramatic life story, giving the reader a sharp sense of place and character but little else of substance. Not this masterful author's best work.