In Country

"They drank warm beer and watched the sun set. It went down orange and then red. Beyond the palm trees in the courtyard, down the lane, Ada saw a woman riding a bicycle, her back straight, one arm steady at her side. Vu said that it was important to live without hate and bitterness and fear. 'This is possible,' he said. In the dusk, a butterfly passed."

A butterfly passed ? Really? Then why doesn't it look like an insect instead of like a literary ornament of random detail? But that's Bergen's modus operandi: stark, dislocated observations to denote great suffering and disaffection. You think I'm swatting too hard at this little bug, but who's that straight-backed, steady-armed woman riding a bicycle? Forget it: She's just another butterfly pinned to the canvas of this self-consciously lethargic novel.

The Time In Between is just that: a series of momentous pauses between events in which desperately lonely people stare off at apparently random scenes and utter short, weighty observations. And once you notice Bergen's technique, instead of watching him soar, all you can see are the wires. Consider this Hemingwayesque moment in which Charles drops by the home of an American missionary and his wife:

"One Friday, late afternoon, he called on the family and she was alone; Jack had taken the children to the roller rink. She was on the balcony, sitting in her usual chair. Her bare legs, the half full glass of wine, the magazine in her lap -- he noted and found pleasure in these things. She'd cut her hair. He mentioned this.

" 'Do you like it? Sort of flapper.'

"It was. The bangs highlighted her green eyes. He nodded and sat. He said that he was lost."

There it is again: that deliberate fusion of the banal and the profound, and it keeps up, paragraph after paragraph, as characters pause, stare, sleep and utter muffled cries. The depressed will find no solace here, others only despair. In representing loneliness and disaffection, Bergen has succeeded all too well.

Ron Charles is a senior editor of Book World.