Strange Love: A Novel

Waitzkin (Searching for Bobby Fischer) chronicles a one-sided relationship in this slim, underwhelming volume. An unnamed 65-year-old New Yorker meets Rachel, 30 years younger, in Fragata, Costa Rica. Visitors are charmed by the tiny village; one says it’s “right out of a Marquez novel,” and, indeed, the scenes there are the highlights. The narrator, who found fleeting success as a novelist 30 years earlier, recounts stories such as meeting Sammy Davis Jr., in a bar, and one about Miguel, a fisherman who is “king of the realm,” and reels in a “monster cubera snapper” weighing 80 lbs. These episodes have more life than the dull romance between the narrator and Rachel, who resists his sexual advances. (The narrator’s infatuation feels more desperate than strange.) When he returns to New York and takes a job as an exterminator, descriptions of killing mice, rats, and bugs are offered in vivid detail. Back in Fragata, Rachel copes with a terminally ill nephew, and the narrator returns still hoping to woo her. The ebb and flow of events gives this the feel of a draft of something that was never fully realized. Ruiz’s illustrations are nice, but they cannot flesh out the undercooked novel. (May)