'Death and the Surf', with its main character Fran, spends less time in Spain than in the creaky, peat-scented realmof bullfighting. There are thoughtful, well-researched sections on bull breeding, explanations of the byzantine system of scoring and scheduling professional bullfights, descriptions of the repertory of torero moves and the highly orchestrated three-act structure of the fight itself, as well as intelligent discussion of the work and influence of Hemingway, something an American journalist writing a book about bullfighting(with a protagonist who draws his bloodline through'The Sun Also Rises, 'no less)is going to have to reckon with. What Lewine has created may be the most in-depth, incisively written literary guide to bullfighting available in English. Every drunken sophomore riding the rails to Pamplona this summer ought to keep a Volume in his backpack. At times, though, 'Death and the Sun'is too thorough a guide. We learn that seating sections in a bullring are Called tendidos, what kind of seat you can get for ＄3. 50 in Madrid and that Pamplona was under control of the Visigoths, Franks and Moors. Not only do we bear wimess to the grueling nature of life on the road for Fran's team, but we find out who gets to ride shotgun in the Mereedes minibus, where everyone else sits, and who brings a pillow. Maybe the deep reporting is meant to fill in for plot. In the end, Fran's season doesn't have that Hemingway- Almodóvar Spanish drama—those lights—that Lewine was probably hoping for There are some exciting moments but the narrative doesn't order itself into the classic three-act structure we expect stories about bullfighters and boxers to hew to, thanks to Ron Howard. So Lewine, a frequent contributor to The New York Times, is left trying to pull the narrative torque from the person of Fran. Lewine writes often, and well, about how bullfighting is an art performed by two actors, one of them a 1, 200-pound horned ruminant bred to look scary and without much mind for collaboration. It's within this unpredictability that the beauty(and danger)of the bullfight lies and sometimes the bull just doesn't cooperate. Fran himself, it turns out, wasn't very cooperative. He appears rigid, opaque, distant. Lewine had remarkable access to Fran and his cortege for the better part of eight months, but there are only a few human moments with the bullfighter, and even those are too small to stretch out into a character. He was in the middle of a public divorce, but you'd barely notice. Too bad. As it is, if Fran is something other than reticent, noble and bullfighterly, you wouldn't know it from reading the book. This is the problem with the genre: you commit to your subject, invest a year of your life, but sometimes you end up with someone either too self-conscious or, like most athletes, too unreflective to reveal himself to you. Unlike Hemingway, if Lewine didn't know what his matador was thinking, he wasn't allowed to make it up. From this passage we know that bullfighting is_____.