George Szanto won justifiable praise in 1990 for The Underside of Stones, his first in a planned trilogy of novels set in the fictional landscape of Michocuaro, Mexico. The novel offered a probing of privileged North American consciousness in an alienating landscape that was as fresh and intriguing on second reading as the first. The novel was mildly confessional, offering a deeply bemused writing style not only purposefully elusive, but enormously satisfying. Several of the chapters can be read by themselves and indeed, one, “How Ali Cran Got His Name,” earned a National Magazine Award in 1988.

That novel’s sequel, Second Sight, is less deeply ruminative than Underside and almost entirely bereft of the rich weave of stories discovered there (such as the family feuds and revenge killings, two-headed women, and the mysterious scorpion-man, Ali Cran). Second Sight is still enjoyable, but for its own reasons. The certainties of realistic fiction that Szanto once shunned – the assurances of setting and time within a linear plotline – now ground the reader in a workmanlike, Chandleresque detective story that raises, then resolves, a sufficient number of questions to engage the reader. Where the narrator Jorge once moved gingerly in and out of the lives of his Mexican characters while trying to understand their unique and alien lives, his intent now is a more prosaic one: to solve a mystery, the disappearance of a good friend.

This solving of a disappearance – common potboiler fare – obtains enough of the lyrical grace and artful intelligence found in Szanto’s first book to place it well above the ordinary. His preoccupation with the cultural gulf that exists between ways of seeing the world and sheer writerly competence make this book and George Szanto’s writing generally well worth reading. One caveat, however: an appreciation of Second Sight grows with a reading of The Underside of Stones, which is currently being reissued in paperback.