The Argentine writer, Manuel Puig, is one of the most consistently interesting novelists to have emerged anywhere during the past 10 years. "The Buenos Aires Affair," his third novel … is, like "Betrayed by Rita Hayworth" and "Heartbreak Tango" before it, a sustained bravura performance by a writer keenly conscious of how both the novel as a literary form and the kinds of people who are its best subjects have been caught up in the clichés of popular culture, especially in its Hollywood versions. Like Nabokov, Puig takes endless delight in contemporary poshlost—all the most shameless forms of trash masquerading as sublimity—while using it against itself to show how it deforms lives and how a cunningly crafted literary art can transcend it….

What makes Puig so fascinating, here as in his two previous books, is the extraordinary inventiveness he exhibits in devising new ways to render familiar...