The Holy Spirit of My Uncle's: Cojones

At times charming, sometimes trite, this is the fictional memoir of Antonio McCaugh Villalobos, a semisuicidal 34-year-old, half Appalachian-Scot, half Salvadoran from Tennessee. Tony published a novel in his early 20s, based on his Salvadoran family's history. A decade later, he has become an introverted journeyman English professor, splitting his time between the University of Tennessee in Knoxville and two small neighboring colleges. When his mother calls from San Francisco to tell him that his Uncle Jack has died, he seizes upon the excuse to escape a confrontation with his live-in lover, a foxy 23-year-old grad student whom he has just discovered serving up more than tennis balls with her blond partner, who is hung like his racket handle. Struggling to reconcile his mixed ethnicities, Tony is something of a basket case and has an adolescent fixation on the size of his equipment. His pilgrimage to the Bay Area brings back memories of the summer he was 16, when he was sent West by his mother after slashing his wrists over a girl, and placed under the tutelage of his pot-smoking rakehell Uncle Jack as a primitive exercise in psychotherapy. The bulk of the narrative recounts Tony's exploits as drug-dealing Uncle Jack flees south of the border to escape the mob. Hiding out in the boonies with Jack's sensual ex-wife, Ricarda, young Tony's hangups are exorcised, and when he returns home, he is, however tenuously, a man. Villatoro's (A Fire in the Earth) depiction of the fiery Latino personality and plentiful dialogue in Spanish add color to the narrative. Sexual initiation, ethnic conflict, penis envy and mushroom and mescaline-laced voodoo make for some colorful scenes, and, while Tony's odyssey of self-pity has its longueurs, the slyly humorous ending should satisfy macho readers. (Sept.)