IRRAWADDY TANGO

A promising second novel—about an Asian dictator's wife—that is soon overwhelmed by incidents and insights presumably significant but too often contrived and unconvincing. Set like its predecessor, The Coffin Tree (1983), in the US and a nameless Asian country—but strongly suggestive of Burma—the story begins as the narrator, recently returned from exile at the request of her former husband, finds herself imprisoned near the zoo. How she got there is related in subsequent chapters, and those describing her childhood in a small town near the Irrawaddy river are especially fine. Told by a cousin that ``style is not as easy as it looks, you must have potential,'' and thinking that potential is what got you ``things like brocades and portable record players,'' the narrator looks for her own potential. She eventually finds hers in dancing the tango, an ability that leads to fame, a show-biz name—Tango—and marriage to a powerful but psychopathic general. The general, a really nasty piece of work, soon organizes a coup; becomes the Supremo; and proceeds to destroy the country, while Tango, bent on surviving, keeps her naturally decent and sound opinions to herself. But exile is in the cards, so she must endure ambush and capture by rebels; an affair with their leader; recapture by the general's troops, who torture her; and, after her release, marriage to a nerdy American do-gooder. The marriage fails, and Tango moves to Washington, where she hangs out with the homeless and with fellow exiles, has a miscarriage, and is very unhappy: ``I don't want to be healed...I knew why I was wounded and angry; and it was my right to hold onto that wound.'' Only a return home, and a brutal but very stagy murder, loaded with symbols, provide the presumed healing. Lots of strong writing but never enough to breathe life into this ultimately inert story.