Book Review : Too Many Ingredients Spoil Broth

Desert Fabuloso by Lisa Lovenheim (NAL Penguin/Plume Book: $7.95, paperback)

Woe to the dinner party where the appetizer is better than the entree, and the entree better than the dessert; woe to the novel where the introduction is better than the middle, and the middle better than the end.

The introduction to “Desert Fabuloso” is absolutely spectacular. Those first six pages sweat such a fierce appetite that perhaps no ordinary novel could satisfy it. There’s such an irony of tone here, such an elegant-but-killingly casual exposition of characters, and above all, such a perfect evocation of scene that nothing could measure up to its promise.

“Desert Fabuloso” is the first novel of a writer of strong talent, and it’s fascinating to read from a writer’s point of view. You see the author, in a sense, learning to create narrative, the way people learn to drive a car: sometimes with panache, sometimes with uneventful ease, but then the gears grind, the car lurches, and that left turn in traffic in front of the 18-wheeler may not turn out so well.

If a dinner party and a new driver seem like too many metaphors, an embarrassment of figurative-language riches, that is particularly appropriate to “Desert Fabuloso.” The author here is swimming in words, scenes, plot, and by the end, she may have drowned in her own excesses.

The setting here is (very contemporary) Santa Fe, N.M. People buy their clothes from boutiques with names like PerSuede, they patronize the opera, they drink to excess, they gossip to something far past excess. They live from party to party; they are chic to more than a fault, and their sexual tolerance passes understanding.

Santa Fe! A perfect society to write about, combining, as it does, past and present, the chichi and the genuine. The underpinnings of Spanish-Indian America are still very much there, as John Nichols readers will remember, so the place is rife with both decoration and bedrock conflict.

Lisa Lovenheim sticks with the decoration. After her stunning, ironic, wildly comic introduction that so beautifully sets her literary stage, she drifts all too quickly into the romantic and then the cloyingly sentimental. An author, perhaps, can never be any better than his or her characters. . . .

John Aaron is a middle-aged, homosexual businessman who has retired to Santa Fe. After the first social flurry that surrounds him, he’s dismissed as absolutely too dull for words. Except for an occasional fling with young men of Latin extraction, John does nothing of particular interest; he is unenlivened by love. Then, for purposes of the plot, John travels to New York, picks up--and then falls in love with--Bradley Roberson III, gay heir of a very rich, repressed “closet queen” and a rather sweet, uneducated heterosexual mom, whom his father married to keep his sexual preferences hidden from the larger world.

John and his young beloved, Bradley, return to Santa Fe, where Bradley is wined and dined and fallen in love with by practically everyone. Then John and Bradley have a falling out. Bradley moves all alone into an adobe cottage on an historic unpaved street, next to a very straight Mexican-American family. (Right around this point, if this novel were a car, it would be making that foolhardy left turn in traffic in front of the semi.)

The Valdez family has a darling younger son, a creepy vandalizing older son, a devout and friendly mother, a bonehead dad. The mother and younger son befriend Bradley, who’s pining from a broken heart, drinking far too much, letting his housekeeping go, but putting in a showplace garden. Out of homophobia, pure devilment and a vague fear that Bradley may corrupt his little brother, the vandalizing Valdez tears up that gorgeous garden. Bradley is heartbroken. Right about this time he steals a wooden Indian and brings it home as his only companion.

The reader can grow to hate that wooden Indian very quickly. Bradley names him, prays to him, pours liquor for him, swears other characters to secrecy about him. The author continually refers to that wooden Indian by name, as though he were a real character, so that again and again the reader is jarred, thumbs back through pages, realizes it’s that damn wooden Indian again--and through this process, Bradley, who has begun as a very real and sympathetic character, becomes a person you’d cross the street not to have to say hello to.

The problem here is tone. The author starts off with that controlled and bracing comic irony, but ends up oh-so-mawkish cutesy-pie. Why? My feeling is that she, and her splendid evocation of Santa Fe as mise en scene , were just too strong for the characters she created to tell her story. But the book is still worth reading. It may not be a fabulous tale, but Lovenheim--with all her faults--is a fabulous writer.