THE SLEEP OF THE ABORIGINES

The final installment of Harsch's Driftless trilogy starts with a bang and ends with a thud as Harsch sends his protagonist, Spleen (a reporter who is the twin brother of the hero of the first volume) on a listless, bizarre search for Harsch's fictional killer after Harsch's body is found face-down in a swimming pool. Spleen's investigation gets off to a rough start when he is almost mauled by an attack dog, and the progress of the prose is similarly hindered by numerous passages in which he reflects on the attributes and flaws of his erstwhile wife, the Brilliant Redhead, who is about to take off for Tennessee with his two precocious kids. The weird interludes begin in earnest when Spleen starts visiting suspects and tipsters, starting with a character dubbed the Fag With No Eyebrows, who gives him a bum steer. Spleen then has a couple of odd, sexual experiences with Candida Sickles and her daughter, Thrush. He also tries to get some leads from Bette Davis, a transvestite character from the opening volume of the series. Harsch's flair for the strange matches the noirish weirdness of the earlier volumes, but this time around most of the lurid scenes fail to generate much narrative tension, and the climax involving a blackmail subplot is barely comprehensible, much less compelling. Harsch got this series off to a solid start in The Driftless Zone, but the quality has fallen in the subsequent volumes. (Aug. 20)