The Sage of Mexico

Unfortunately, the novel-within-the-novel devotes hundreds of pages to Beulah's puerile ruminations, her story of incest and bulimia, her sexual dysfunctions and other expendable subplots. Anderson's depiction of Gregory's marital problems is the stuff of soap operas. And Beulah's and Gregory's actions don't ring true. In addition, the film-noirish elements of the narrative (Who attacked Beulah? Will Gregory go to jail?) are tired stuff. Anderson's heart doesn't seem to be in it, which stalls Hunger's Brides whenever he returns to this limp mystery aspect of his novel.

Not to dramatize Sor Juana's relationship with María Luisa Manrique de Lara y Gónzaga, vicereine of New Spain, is another huge mistake. It could be argued that María Luisa was the most significant person in Sor Juana's life: She was her protector from the zealots of the church and the muse of many of Sor Juana's most impassioned love poems. She also published Inundación castálida , Sor Juana's first book of poems, thus preserving them for posterity. Instead, what Anderson gives us is a series of uninspired letters that Sor Juana writes to María Luisa after she has returned to Spain.

Despite Anderson's extravagant gifts, he is an apprentice novelist, one who mistakes prolixity for weight, chaos for complexity, and cleverness for depth. We get plays, talky film scripts, poems by other major writers of the Spanish Golden Age, police interrogations, lengthy footnotes, and reams of clunky exposition. But the moments when we are allowed to look inside Sor Juana's heart are few and far between.

Hunger's Brides is a novel of high seriousness, a labor of love. And Anderson earns our admiration for his ability to write passages that leave us swooning with their musicality and their radiance. Still, we expect good novels to create an unbroken spell from which we awake only when we're done reading them. Instead, I was left with a fractured experience that reminded me of the worse excesses of the rococo gone haywire. We don't remember Sor Juana for her witty parlor games -- fun though they may be -- but for the toughness and brilliance of her intellect and the scorching passion of her art.

There is not one moment in this hugely overwritten novel that reminded me of the Sor Juana who advised Portia:

Leave those lethal coals alone:

your love's not equal to those flames.

Your passion teaches us that she who flings herself on the pyre will never learn that love can burn you alive.

And yet, in many places, Anderson touches greatness. ·

Jaime Manrique's new novel, "Our Lives Are the Rivers," will be published in 2006.