FICTION

KILL HOLE by Jamake Highwater (Grove Press: $18.95; 256 pp.). Seldom does a first sentence tell us more: “Someone must have been telling lies about Sitko Ghost Horse, because without having done anything wrong he was arrested.” Word for word, it’s the opening sentence of Kafka’s “The Trial,” except for the Native American name. We know then that this novel will be a cultural hybrid; also that it will strain for its effects.

The people who arrest Sitko are Indians who live in an untouched, pre-Columbian world (though an occasional airplane flies overhead). Sitko has stumbled across their village after fleeing an epidemic--deadly as AIDS, rapid as the plague--that has devastated modern America. His arrival coincides with a ceremony that will initiate the tribe’s children into adulthood. Thrown into a makeshift jail, he is told that he has contaminated them and that they may have to be killed. The wailing of the children in their underground chamber awakens memories of his own tortured childhood.

Sitko, an artist, a gay man, an Indian abandoned as a boy and raised under another name by whites, has always lived on borders. Now he must find his true identity as he straddles past, present and future. Jamake Highwater (“Anpao,” “Myth and Sexuality”) makes Sitko’s ordeal as a prisoner vivid and persuasive; the best character in the novel is his jailer and counterpart, Patu, a man filling the tribal role of “powerful woman.” The straining comes in the flashbacks to Sitko’s life in an orphanage, a foster home and the big-city art world. These are too realistic to support the novel’s apocalyptic vision, yet too hastily and luridly sketched to convince on their own terms.