In December 1996, a Manhattan advertising executive named Marina Palmer flew down to Buenos Aires for a vacation. And there she fell hopelessly in love with the tango. When she returned to New York, she enrolled in three different tango schools and became so thoroughly obsessed that she quit her job and later moved to Argentina to study the dance.

“Kiss and Tango” (William Morrow, 336 pages, $24.95) is Ms. Palmer’s account of her travels, trials, and loves while living in Buenos Aires. It is written in diary form, with a voice that suggests the author could not decide if she wanted to write a diary or a novel. The tone wobbles between that of a cliche-sputtering simpleton and a thoughtful, curious traveler.

Regardless, Ms. Palmer is devoted to the dance and her task: to learn the tango well enough to make a living from it. She hopes to find a partner and a regular performance gig. In the tango world, there are alliances and jealousies, pecking orders and signals, expectations and limitations. The reader gets a peek into a tight community.

Judging by the writing, the author’s personality developed through her travels. The first third of the book is a thin gruel of language. For example, in New York, trying to deal with her soul crushing advertising job, Ms. Palmer writes: “Also, I feel bad because I have been cranky with my assistant, no matter how hard I try not to be. But boy, does she get on my nerves!”

But the gruel gives way later to some richer prose. In the wake of the Argentinean currency devaluation, she escapes to a relative’s farm outside the city, where she reflects on the situation: “I have been glued to the TV all afternoon. The violence taking place outside what used to be my doorstep is mind boggling. Surely that’s not where I used to live? I can’t connect these visions of hell with my street.”

Her sense of alienation is honest, a quality Ms. Palmer maintains throughout the book. She has to ask her father to support her tango dreams, because her trust fund has run out. And when she’s in Buenos Aires, she’s sensitive to the fact that though she’s slumming it, most of the people she’s dancing with have it much harder.

At the same time, she’s able to laugh off the horrified looks from friends of friends in high society, who regard her as eccentric. “They all belonged to the class of Argentine who wouldn’t be caught dead dancing the tango – it is far too proletarian – which is why they relied on me to give them a vicarious frisson.”

“Kiss and Tango” is also quite frank about sex, of which there is plenty. Ms. Palmer has some fun getting to know the local tango boys, and she makes quite a study of their machismo. Her observations are often amusing, but frequently vulgar. The vulgarities wouldn’t be so bad, except that Ms. Palmer seems to be a girl who should know better, who shouldn’t have bothered with these imbeciles or their unsatisfactory genitalia.

The book covers the years between January 1997 and February 2002, which gives her closer proximity than we have now to the once-popular dating manual called “The Rules.”

Her references to the book – a throwback volume that suggested women do things like wait for guys to call and then wait to return their phone calls – seem dated. Anyway, if she did read “The Rules,” it didn’t take. Ms. Palmer had a series of lovers in Buenos Aires, but only one boyfriend, who then flitted off with his tango partner.

Worse, a few simple things in this book just seem plain weird, or wrong. In a ballet class (which Ms. Palmer takes because it helps with the tango), the teacher starts by forcing her to stretch into a split. Techniques vary, but most ballet classes begin with simple plies, then move into deeper stretching. And in New York, Ms. Palmer encounters a guy on the late night tango scene who is a staff reporter for a major New York daily newspaper.

Now, I think I’ve heard of newspaper people who have hobbies, but they’re usually hobbies that allow you to sit still, like reading. Or drinking. I want to know what newspaper writer has the energy to go out and tango after work.