On his way home from his father's funeral, John Aaron, a Santa Fe property developer, picks up a stranger in a leather bar in New York and takes him back to his hotel. The devastatingly beautiful stranger turns out not to be the hustler John had taken him for, but Bradley Roberson III, wealthy young man about town and Juilliard dropout, and he ends up coming back to New Mexico with John, to cause chaos in the small and rather select gay community there. And to run away with a wooden Indian...

This starts out as a rather savagely Gore-Vidalish satire of the members of the chattering classes - gay and straight - who've retreated to the artistic oasis of Santa Fe to commune with their trust funds. I'm sure that there must be some roman-à-clef stuff going on here, and that some of the characters Lovenheim sticks her claws into would have recognised themselves (but not necessarily to the extent of actually blushing), but it's still very funny even if you don't know them and have never been to Santa Fe.

However, you need something more than this one joke to build a novel on, and Lovenheim does this by allowing a few of her characters to develop a little bit more depth as we go along, and turning the book into something of a study of mother-child relationships and some of the ways they can go wrong. The transition between pure satire and the more thoughtful side of the book felt a little bit clumsy, but once we were over the hump, things started to trundle along nicely again, and overall it was quite an enjoyable read, with a lot of nice original touches.

Probably not quite worth building a time machine and travelling back to 1987 for, but a pleasant period piece if you happen to come across it. ( )

Desert Fabuloso is a book published in 1987 that tells the story first of John Aaron, who upon turning forty, divorces his wife and leaves the family business to move to Santa Fe, New Mexico to live openly as a gay man. Later, he meets Bradley Roberson III, a good-looking man with a fortune and a needy mother, and convinces him he'd find Santa Fe refreshing. Bradley is frivolous, fabulous and unhappy, and he manages to make himself the center of gossip as he drinks himself into oblivion and behaves terribly. But as time passes, his friendship with a neighborhood Latino boy and his mother, as well as a wooden statue of a Native American he steals from a local hotel, give him the impetus to change.

The chatty and casual voice of this novel, as well as its publication date, had me thinking that this book would be primarily a historical oddity. Set in that short span of time between when it became reasonably safe for some gay white men of means to live openly in a few places and when the AIDs crisis changed everything, I thought this novel, the only one Lisa Lovenheim ever published, would be a fun snapshot of fabulous gay life, of handsome men in snazzy pastel suits drinking champagne and making wry comments kind of thing. And there was a little of that, but it was a more interesting story about two people finding their place in the world. John Aaron becomes content with the friends he has and with his relatively quiet life, while Bradley's story is more poignant. Coming from Manhattan and buying a run-down adobe house in an established neighborhood, he discovers a love of gardening, and if that new interest is also accompanied by heavy drinking and a love of sun-bathing, it doesn't stop him from forming tentative friendships with a bored little boy and his very traditional Latina mother. The way that connection is strained by the actions of another member of that family serves to remind everyone that no matter how moneyed and popular, Bradley's space in the world is not a safe one, given his refusal to be anything other than who he is. ( )