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Mofa

Mofa (which means 'mockery' in Spanish) was my second novel, begun in Costa Rica in about 1968 and finished in Riverside, California. It drew extensively on the year and a half I spent in Central America. It was my intention to write about sexual repression—to create a sense of strangled desire, truncated passion. After I wrote it, I sent it to a well-known agent. He sent me a two and a half page letter in response. "Books like this," he essentially told me, "should never be written, and if they are written, they should never be published." I never sent it anywhere else.

Mofa begins with a solitary traveler beaching his sailboat on an island (based roughly on Isla Mujeres) off the Yucatan coast of Mexico. He meets a wealthy American family—and is drawn into a morass of guilts and desires, both theirs and his own. The novel is fairly conventional in both structure and language (unlike most of my work). It was my intention to keep its surface understated, while beneath the unadorned language the repressed passions surged and roiled, affecting not so much the conscious mind but the unconscious. I wanted the reader to end up feeling uneasy, disturbed, without quite knowing why. Judging from the reaction of the agent, it seems to have succeeded.