FICTION

PARADISE OVERDOSE by Brian Antoni (Simon & Schuster: $21; 251 pp.). Robin, an artist who has come to the Bahamas for a last-ditch cancer treatment, at one point tells Chris Angostura, her newly acquired, Anglo-Caribbean lover, “I refuse to pity someone who has everything but does nothing.” The statement isn’t exactly accurate; Chris has many activities, but they are largely limited to spear-fishing, sailing his yacht, snorting enormous amounts of cocaine and indulging in constant, meaningless sex. Chris, in short, is not a very interesting character--a major problem for a novel in which he plays the protagonist, and for whom it is difficult to feel not merely pity but anything at all. Brian Antoni has an extraordinary tale to tell--in real life he’s heir to a Trinidad- and Bahamas-made fortune, son to a white doctor in a largely black community, brother to an award-winning writer and a near-notorious young artist--but it comes through badly in this disguised and displaced fiction. Frequent and steamy sex scenes hardly make “Paradise Overdose” seem sentimental, but at bottom it’s a warm-water “Love Story” in which a dying woman’s love saves a man from squandered talent and emotional anomie. Chris acts either like a child or an automaton; Robin is an idealized, unbelievable Artist, a fictionalized version of the author’s sister Janine (best known for her mastication of chocolate and lard). The one compelling relationship in the novel is that between Chris and Shark, son of the Angostura family’s black housekeeper, for it shows starkly how Chris, being white and rich, has a limitless future, while Shark, being black and poor, has little to lose. That’s a theme worth further exploration in nonfiction, and one for which Antoni is well qualified.