Romeo Kuchmir is a character who has found an author who has failed to find a proper place for Romeo. Kuchmir is literally all there is to George Ryga's new novel, Night Desk. He is not simply a narrator, as was Snit in Ryga's earlier Hungry Hills. Romeo is a soliloquist who has seized a stage no one else seems particularly interested in, and swells roundly enough to fill it with anecdote.

The stage he has seized is the strip of floor space before the clerk's desk of a third-rate hotel in a western city. The audience that goes with it is the night man, simply "kid" to Romeo and to us. (p. 83)

In his first play, Indian, Ryga's chief character pleads to the Indian agent: "I got no past … no future … nothing!… I dead! You get it?… I never been anybody. I not just dead … I never...