Weighty Words That Sink Like Stones

DRAINING THE SEA

By Micheline Aharonian Marcom

Riverhead. 335 pp. $26.95

In Micheline Marcom's ambitious novel "Draining the Sea," a nameless narrator collects the dead bodies of dogs, puts them carefully into the trunk of his car and takes them to his house in the Santa Monica Mountains. When he's not driving this stinking roadkill around Los Angeles, he watches game shows on television, ponders the sterility of American life and dreams of a woman in Guatemala.

Los Angeles seems to induce the same apocalyptic visions in writers with very different sensibilities. For Jack Kerouac, Nathanael West and Joan Didion, to name a few, the city is a burial ground for the American dream. For Marcom's narrator, Los Angeles is a nightmare where "the horizon has perished, and we are stranded here, at the pilgrim's apogee" -- the place where Americans play out the last act of their lives, "eating ice cream," "dieting on fat bowls of cereals and swimming in . . . chemical pools."

"Draining the Sea" is the last volume of a trilogy in which Marcom set out to explore the atrocities of the Armenian genocide of 1915. But here, the author's interests have shifted to the Guatemalan civil war of the 1980s. The book's title comes from words attributed to the military commander responsible for the scorched-earth policy his army carried out against the people of Guatemala: "The guerrilla is the fish. The people are the sea. If you cannot catch the fish you have to drain the sea." What justified this madness, in which children's heads are bashed against river stones and young men are beaten until their brains fall out? "We are fighting a cold war," he says. "The communist scum will get us if we don't watch out."

The novel is a richly symbolic dream. Wandering around Los Angeles, the narrator is overwhelmed by his love for Marta, an indigenous girl from a remote province of Guatemala. But Marta -- a simple creature who can speak only the Ixil dialect, and who fled to the mountains to escape the massacre -- may be a phantasm. A year after her flight, government soldiers murdered her in the basement of a school in Guatemala. Or did they? Was she tortured and killed? Did she ever exist? And finally, does the narrator bear a responsibility for her death, even if she is his creation?

In this highly mannered, plotless novel, the leading characters share a tenuous connection to reality. Given the author's predilection for ambiguity, it's not easy to summarize the plot of "Draining the Sea" -- or even to follow it. Her frequent use of invented words and run-on sentences perplexes the reader and disserves the writer. What are "denizens of livered historiographies"? Can you make sense of this? "The heart, an organ's meaty desire, can be like capital's descent into your cities and towns -- because who built the cathedrals?"

Outside of creative writing workshops, stream of consciousness has pretty much gone out of fashion, perhaps because, except where the consciousness belonged to a master like James Joyce, it is such a chore to "unstream." The inner workings of a character's mind do not necessarily communicate the character's essence. More important, stream-of-consciousness prose often lacks emotional texture, resulting in a flatness that bogs the reader down. "Draining the Sea" fails to reward the reader for the hard work of slogging through its text.

Whatever meaning one can discover in Marcom's novel comes from its incessant repetitions, which create indelible images for the reader. Most of these sensational images are almost too much to bear: Marta with her hands cut off; Marta possibly alive when she's thrown into a pit and doused with chemicals; young soldiers carrying their dogs on their backs, forced to kill them with their bare hands and ordered to drink their blood. Seared in one's mind is the image of the complicity of the United States: "My president [Reagan] is eating dinner sugary desserts in Tegucigalpa with your general."

Raised in Los Angeles, the child of an American father and an Armenian-Lebanese mother, Marcom observed the force of history as it bore down on her grandmother during the Armenian genocide. A talented, passionate young writer, she urges the reader to revolt at the inhumanity in our midst. Even though her style lacks maturity, "Draining the Sea" is a daring attempt to face down evil and an original contribution to a growing body of literature that bears witness to the atrocities of our time.

The dog-corpse collector narrator who watches television from a green armchair in L.A. finally becomes a sympathetic Everyman. He starts out as a "good American boy; he likes parties, he likes the television, he likes ice cream." But in re-creating the martyrdom of Marta, he transcends his passivity to become a storyteller. Stories console for the memories that prompt them, making it possible to endure all that is precarious and horrific in reality. In the end, it's stories that defeat death, and if that's the case, then for Micheline Marcom, writing them is an act of love.