Billy Verite

Returning to LaCrosse, Wis., and several of the characters from his debut, The Driftless Zone, Harsch chronicles the rise of B.A.D., a motorcycle gang led by Skunk Forhension, a Lee Harvey Oswald look-alike with a penchant for talking his enemies to death. Preternaturally ugly PI Billy Verite is hired by undercover police officer Stratton to spy on B.A.D. but falls for Stratton's nymphomaniac girlfriend Lola (for all the stylistic inventiveness, Harsch writes women characters according to old-fashioned types). With seemingly intentional disregard for conventional plotting, Harsch removes Billy and Lola from LaCrosse to a nearby deserted island in the Mississippi River (an odd contrivance, given the region's abundance of hiding places). Billy builds a fort on the island and engages with Lola in various Huck-Finnish escapades of an adolescently repressed creepiness that detracts from Billy's already shaky position as the novel's moral center. Harsch's enjoyment of quirky rhetorical flourishes (""feary quietude,"" a ""ribby chest,"" ""his apperceptual doldrums"") is distracting, although some of the many neologisms he sprinkles about the text are poetic (the inspired ""Zorbic,"" from Zorba the Greek, for instance). Harsch obviously has talent, but in this novel he seems determined to spread it thin. (Sept.)