Warning: the Rabbit Is Loose

By R.Z. Sheppard

Who is that gray-haired gringo acting up on top of the carnival float?

You mean the one decked out in medieval myth, gorgeous metaphors and a devilish grin? That's John Updike, the North American writer who usually makes his living turning out fiction about the lust-lives of New England palefaces.

What is he doing in Rio de Janeiro? To judge from the antics in his latest novel, Brazil (Knopf; 260 pages; $23), he seems to be having the sort of good time that not everyone will appreciate.

Like a Shriner with a water pistol? Something like that. Even writers have to get out of the house once in a while. The last time Updike cut loose abroad was about 15 years ago, when he used an African setting for The Coup. Now he retells the Tristan and Isolde legend as a love story about a black teenage mugger from the hillside slums of Rio and an upper-class white girl with a hunger for forbidden experience.

Finding taboos in Brazil is not easy. How many can be left in a country where homeless children are hunted by death squads? White skins still lord it over black skins, but, unlike North Americans, Brazilians have a working concept of interracial society. "All colors merge into one joyous, sun- stunned flesh-color, coating the sand with a second living skin," writes Updike of Copacabana, the beach where Tristao meets Isabel. In a gesture of courtly love, he presents her with a ring stripped from the finger of a matronly tourist. The initials on the crest are DAR (Daughters of the American Revolution?). Tristao reads that as "to give."

This is the kind of multilingual humor practiced by Vladimir Nabokov, except that he would have let the reader make the translation. Subtlety is not Updike's intention. Tristao and Isabel may be descended from ancient legend, but they owe much of their character to Monty Python and those old underground comic books in which Popeye and Olive Oyl assumed positions not found in the funny papers.

For those who prefer to think in post-modern terms, Brazil offers the high and the low, especially when it merges the ideals of romantic love with a perpetual state of rut. The results include "the muck of the psyche," where "sex is nature's dirty work" and "perversity, like chastity, overcomes the bestial drive." The couple's caves of love take many forms: the leafy median of a busy highway, glittering condominium apartments, primitive gold- mining camps and the floor of the Amazon. The sacred and the profane are part of the same ooze. Lyricism mingles with basic Anglo-Saxon in much the way that liberated clergymen in the 1960s flavored their moralism with four-letter words.

Verbally randy Updike also blends styles: realism with surrealism, and journalism with sentimentalism. Some of the best parts are simply missionary- position travel writing. But stabs at social and cultural commentary frequently sound like V.S. Naipaul on a slow day.

As a future dead white male, Updike makes mischief with a changing world that unsettles his sensibilities and excites his imagination. In a spasm of Latin American magic realism, he turns Isabel into a black lesbian and Tristao into a white businessman. A tirelessly inventive tour de force, this off-color romance may not add much to Updike's stature as a man of letters, but it is a spectacular example of what happens when a writer with talent to burn burns it.