Somewhere South of Here

Kowalski made a good impression with his sentimental first novel, Eddie's Bastard, and continues the story here as he takes hero Billy Mann out to Santa Fe on his motorbike to see if he can trace the mother who gave him away as a baby to be raised by his grandfather. There is no one left in Billy's life except Mildred, his grandfather's elderly companion, who acts like a widow in the wake of his death, and so Billy, now an aspiring writer, feels stifled in his upstate New York hometown. Once in Santa Fe, he meets a sinister Latino neighbor who tells him the girl working at the local cantina may be his sister; through her, Billy finds his mother, dying slowly of cancer in a hospital miles away. He nurses her faithfully in her closing days without ever telling her who he is, starts an affair with Consuelo, a Mexican-born former trapeze artist who is now a singer, quarrels with her, then goes back home and helps Mildred fight off efforts to close down a shelter for unwed mothers she has started in the family's old house. In the end, who should come back, repentant and pregnant, but Consuelo (""`I love you, Beelee.' `I love you, too,' I said. `I know that,' she said."") If all this sounds a little artless, it is. Kowalski has a relaxed, easygoing style, and one or two touching moments shine, but Billy is so utterly without affect, and the other characters are sketched so loosely, that the narrative feels severely underpopulated. This book suffers from a bad case of second-novel syndrome. Agent, Anne Hawkins. 10-city author tour. (Apr. 10)