Book Review : For Unger: Dakota Si; Argentina No

El Yanqui by Douglas Unger (Harper & Row: $16.95)

In “Leaving the Land,” his first novel, Douglas Unger wrote about Dakota farmers and their losing struggle against the big food processors, with a realism that surpassed itself. His sense of the land, the people and the changes that beat against them was so internal and so sure that the result was delicate and winning.

In “El Yanqui,” Unger does what the author of a second novel is likely, though not always wise, to do. He has moved his sensibility from the familiar to the unfamiliar. Do I really own my art if I can’t carry it around? a writer will ask himself. Literary roots are more commonly abandoned than returned to.

Youthful Arrogance

Unger’s second book is told by an American high school senior who goes to Argentina on an exchange program. Part of it takes place in the countryside, where James, the student, stays for a while on an estancia , or cattle ranch. Most of it is set in Buenos Aires at a time--the beginning of the 1970s, I believe, though the history is a little unclear--when the military government was repressing the democratic and the Peronist oppositions, although in a manner less extreme than that of the later military regimes toward the end of the decade.

James, a mixture of counterculture youthful arrogance and an eagerness to understand, is out of his element, which could be promising. Unger, scrupulous and likewise eager to understand, is out of his as well--and this tends to frustrate the promise.

The book’s purposes, all of them worthy, get in each other’s way. It tries to show the broadening and maturing of a self-centered American exposed to a vastly different political and social culture and to experiences that range from warming to frightful. It also tries to show, through James’ experiences, Unger’s own discoveries about a society and a recent history of which we have heard a certain amount, but know very little.

Political Demonstrations

Unger’s enthusiasm for discovery outstrips his enthusiasm for his protagonist. Lodged with a wealthy, affectionate and energetic Argentine family, James goes to an Argentine high school, takes part in political demonstrations, is arrested and beaten, is sent for his own safety to a family-owned estancia , and loses his virginity with a small-town prostitute. Eventually, surfeited, shaken and tougher, he leaves Argentina’s trouble and goes home to face his own. His brother, a Vietnam veteran, has broken down on LSD.

James is good at heart but cloudy. He seems to be learning things, but he never comes in focus enough to make the reader quite sure who is doing the learning. He is mainly Ungar’s vehicle for a portrait of modern Argentina--and he rattles.

Unger’s sensibility is considerable, and he uses more of it on his subject than on his protagonist. In his portrait of James’s hosts, the Benevento family, he catches the peculiar Argentine mix of formality and intimacy. The father is both severe and infinitely tolerant; he makes rules and can be reasoned out of them. When he comes home in the evening, he calls his three sons and James into his study, grills them in detail about their activities, gives them liberal advice and warnings, and finally curls up and reads to them. It is, he proclaims, their common “dream-time.”

Tenderness and Spirit

To most Americans, Argentina undoubtedly conjures up the image of a mainly violent people. What Unger discovers and conveys, is the tenderness and spirit of play with which, politics aside, Argentines so frequently treat each other. James’ school is the scene both of close camaraderie and of a hilarious, far-fetched warfare against the teachers. When James is arrested during a workers’ demonstration, beaten and taken to a football stadium with thousands of others, his fellow detainees comfort and joke with him, not resenting the fact that his American passport and the Benevento connections will soon have him free.

Unger gives a splendid sense of Buenos Aires and its mixture of charm, extravagance and melancholy. The life on the estancia, though sometimes it seems like a National Geographic article, is evocative and exact.

Unger looks very steadily at Argentina and he takes in a lot. If he were writing a travel book or a work of reportage, it would have been a remarkably true one. But the truth of fiction demands a far deeper kind of knowledge and intuition.

The author has listened scrupulously and well, but his ear, though by no means tin, continually misses intonations. The dialogue reads like a literal translation from Spanish; and since the characters are defined by their talk, they seem like literal translations as well.