Unlike David Markson's most recent works, including Vanishing Point and Wittgenstein's Mistress, which David Foster Wallace described as "pretty much the high point of experimental fiction in this country," his early novel, Going Down, is a more traditional effort, a masterfully plotted narrative set in Mexico in the 1960s. Three Americans, a man and two women, are living together in obvious intimacy. Their habits, strange to the Mexicans, are strangest of all to themselves.

When Fern Winters' attention is caught by movement behind a window in a run-down Greenwich...