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Book Review: The Havana Room

Despite a few misteps, Colin Harrison's latest thriller works.

by B.D. | 2004.02.11

The Havana Room
By Colin Harrison
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
$24.00 US

Colin Harrison's fifth novel, The Havana Room, tells the tale of Bill Wyeth, a successful real estate lawyer whose security blanket of fiduciary accumulation, formulaic marriage and paternal responsibility is torn to shreds by the accidental death of a child at his son’s slumber party. The peanut oil-related mishap quickly costs Wyeth his career, his carefully-assembled nest egg, his house, his wife and his young boy. When he reaches the bottom of his downward spiral, Wyeth finds himself alone in a small Hell’s Kitchen one-bedroom outfitted with a well-stocked refrigerator of remorse, longing and depression.

Carving out a toehold in reality as a regular at a comfortingly anonymous neighborhood steakhouse, Wyeth befriends the restaurant’s grown and sexy manager, Allison Sparks (a possible nod to real life midtown steakhouse Sparks?). His life still remains in tatters, but Wyeth takes some solace in the lame routine of throwing on an expensive suit, feasting on a slab of cow and looking at Sparks' long legs. Asked to help broker an 11th hour deal in the steakhouse’s mysterious and usually forbidden Havana Room, Wyeth conjures up his lawyerly acumen to assist in a shady real estate deal for one of Sparks’ paramours, the hulking and handsome Jay Rainey. There is something amiss in the exchange of properties and cash – “One of them was making a killing and I didn’t know which,” says Wyeth, at the time unaware of his punnery – but, with a midnight deadline looming, he is denied the opportunity to investigate the stench of a swindle. This transaction serves as a gateway drug for the cocktail of mysterious characters, violent threats and double-helix-twists that fills the rest of the novel.

The Havana Room is billed as a thriller, but most of the tension is reliant on the gradual assemblage of information, not out of hand-wringing concern for the fate of the protagonist. Wyeth is satisfactorily fleshed-out and empathetic, but even when surrounded by violent gun-waving thugs, he never seems to be in that much peril. This could be because Wyeth remains almost preposterously composed in the face of danger (his ice-water pulse is explained as a rekindling of the lawyerly cool from his former profession). Or maybe it’s because his role as a fulcrum of attention from menacing brown-skinned people such as a Chilean wine mogul and a murderous Hip-Hop club owner is more because of misunderstanding than real involvement in anything treacherous. A sit-down with all concerned parties probably could have wrapped things up 200 pages faster.

A talented and diligent writer, Harrison enjoys employing long rambling list-like descriptions as a literary device. Although seldom integral to the plot, most of these spiels are enjoyable – even if they occasionally make the reader’s eyes leap forward to find out exactly when the shit ends. Harrison also shows painstaking attentiveness to detail when he describes the genuinely interesting ceremonies that go on in the Havana Room and the intricacies of one character’s complicated health problem. It is somewhat queer, then, that a writer residing in New York City would portray Wyeth’s 36th Street & 8th Avenue neighborhood with such a generic brush of dreariness. While not SoHo, the depiction of the Garment District neighborhood as a place with “sad, unsoaped” people and “a tired woman in red pants [who] gave blowjobs from inside her van to clerks on their lunch hours” is somewhat inaccurate. Rents are seldom $1,500 for one-bedrooms on skid row. One inexcusable error takes place when a character reflects on his childhood worship of Cal Ripken Jr. as the player who “revolutionized” the position of second base by being tall and powerful rather than small and fleet-footed. Cal Ripken Jr. played shortstop and third base; his brother, the small and fleet-footed Billy Ripken, played second base.

While we’re griping about inaccuracies, Harrison’s butchery of black dialogue must be pointed at and laughed at. His entire understanding of urban African American dialect seems to begin and end with the knowledge that they deposit an “a” on the end of “nigga” and “motherfucka”. One egregious example of his cluelessness takes place during a truly offensive scene in which the black Hip-Hop club owner incongruously screams out “give me the booty!” while receiving oral sex. Said incident also involves the owner busting his gun in the air as he ejaculates, proclaiming his hatred for the white man and telling the dome-provider that she “looks better than a government check.” Harrison’s Willie Horton-esque vision of a Hip-Hop club includes pit bulls dangling from ropes, casual beatings in stairwells and denizens who look incredulously at Wyeth for being Caucasian. You live in Brooklyn. Go to a Hip-Hop club and talk to a black person, motherfucka.

Still, Harrison’s skill as a storyteller carries The Havana Room. His account of Wyeth’s descent into worthlessness is both believable and enjoyable – although his wife’s series of loathsome betrayals makes the couples’ slapdash last-page reconciliation overly convenient and completely unacceptable. It’s simply irksome -- not ruinous -- as the prospect of Wyeth again suckling on his former wife’s majestic tits is not at all central to the novel’s plot. At its heart, The Havana Room is an exploration of familial loss. From Wyeth to Sparks to Rainey to the club owner, all draw motivation from a similar pain caused by a void in their family. Harrison neatly puts Wyeth at the center of an unenviable equation: his child is taken away from him after he takes a child away from another man. The author’s insistence on the inverse also being true is predictable but enjoyable.

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