South Beach: The Novel - makes Melrose Place look like Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood
South Beach: The Novel
by Brian Antoni
In Brian Antoni’s South Beach, a surreal world of drugs and outlandish characters, including a great drag queen, cross paths in a Miami Beach apartment building that makes Melrose Place look like Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood.
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Gabriel Tucker's gargantuan trust fund has allowed him to spend his life traveling and partying, so he's none too pleased to receive a letter informing him that his uncle has blown all the money in the trust, and the only thing Gabriel has left is a crumbling hotel on South Beach. Gabriel finds the Venus De Milo Arms inhabited by a lip-synching tranny, an AIDS-afflicted gossip columnist, an elderly woman obsessed with her wardrobe and a performance artist named Marina, whom Gabriel promptly falls in love with. Their lives intertwine along with those of a Cuban refugee-cum-supermodel and a fashion designer obsessed with making South Beach's gaudy dilapidation the new chic. As Marina struggles with the past that keeps her from returning Gabriel's affection and the Venus de Milo Arms is threatened with becoming the next pile of rubble on the road to progress, Gabriel starts to realize that the old hotel may be the only place in the world that he can call home. Antoni delights in describing in pornographic detail the absurdities of South Beach (drugs, sex, freakish locals), but he never gets beneath South Beach's chipped veneer. The light treatment has its moments, but it isn't quite satisfying. (Feb.)
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New York Times Book Review
"South Beach: The Novel, Brian Antoni's candy-colored and warmhearted second work of fiction, would make a terrific opera . . . Rich with club scenes and descriptions of off-beat forms of physical congress . . . he means the book to encapsulate the social makeup of a city he clearly loves."
See all Editorial Reviews
Gabriel Tucker's gargantuan trust fund has allowed him to spend his life traveling and partying, so he's none too pleased to receive a letter informing him that his uncle has blown all the money in the trust, and the only thing Gabriel has left is a crumbling hotel on South Beach. Gabriel finds the Venus De Milo Arms inhabited by a lip-synching tranny, an AIDS-afflicted gossip columnist, an elderly woman obsessed with her wardrobe and a performance artist named Marina, whom Gabriel promptly falls in love with. Their lives intertwine along with those of a Cuban refugee-cum-supermodel and a fashion designer obsessed with making South Beach's gaudy dilapidation the new chic. As Marina struggles with the past that keeps her from returning Gabriel's affection and the Venus de Milo Arms is threatened with becoming the next pile of rubble on the road to progress, Gabriel starts to realize that the old hotel may be the only place in the world that he can call home. Antoni delights in describing in pornographic detail the absurdities of South Beach (drugs, sex, freakish locals), but he never gets beneath South Beach's chipped veneer. The light treatment has its moments, but it isn't quite satisfying. (Feb.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
New York Times Book Review
"South Beach: The Novel, Brian Antoni's candy-colored and warmhearted second work of fiction, would make a terrific opera . . . Rich with club scenes and descriptions of off-beat forms of physical congress . . . he means the book to encapsulate the social makeup of a city he clearly loves."
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posted by Tom Jackson @ Wednesday, August 27, 2008
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