Gabriel Tucker is a globe-trotting, trust fund–endowed twenty-nine-year-old who suddenly finds himself penniless and alone in the world, except for an old Miami Beach apartment building named the Venus De Milo Arms, the last thing of value left to him by his now-vanished family. Lacking skills or resources, he heads to Miami Beach to reconstruct his life, finding himself neighbors with an unlikely mix of tenants: an elderly Holocaust survivor, a lip-synching drag queen, a cynical two-bit gossip columnist, and a rebellious young performance artist who will eventually capture his heart.
Within days, Gabriel is thrust into the outrageous world of South Beach, Miami of the nineties: temptations, quick fortunes, mountains of drugs, notorious murders, nonstop sex, and beautiful women (and men) for sale (or rent) are the order of the day. He is a ringside witness to the excesses and intrigues of Italian fashion empires, Cuban refugee supermodels, rapacious German developers, old-fashioned crooked politicians, and a cast of characters that would make Caligula blush. He is witness to a place evolving from God’s Waiting Room to the American Riviera, from slum to brand name.
It is in South Beach, in this most surreal time and place, unlike any other, that Gabriel will eventually discover the long-buried mysteries of his family and find a soul he never imagined he had and a love he never dreamed he deserved.
Antoni, Brian. “South Beach: A Novel”, Black Cat/Grove, 2008.
Where He Belongs
Amos Lassen
South Beach, Florida is a resort that has many clubs and all kinds of sexual activity. So we learn from Brian Antoni by reading his new novel simply entitled “South Beach”. Antoni gives us the moral and sexual odyssey of one Gabriel Tucker, a man who comes to South Beach and says to himself, “This is where I belong”.
Gabriel Tucker is a handsome man and straight, an orphan who had a trust-fund income until his uncle committed suicide and left him only an old Miami Beach apartment house by the name of “The Venus deMilo Arms”. When Gabriel moves into the building, he finds a bevy of residents there of which there is enough to write a novel about each one.
Martina is an artist who has mixed feelings about Gabriel. Miss Levy, a Holocaust survivor is living in both the past and the future. She dresses English-mod and has under her bed filled with tuna fish just in case she will have to be hungry again. Pandora is a mute transsexual trying to get enough money to pay for sexual reassignment surgery. There is Skip, a gossip columnist with AIDS and a Cuban hustler named Jesus who washes ashore and is rescued by Versace stand-in, Salvatore Fabrizio who turns the rent boy into a high fashion model and excessively pampers him.
It is abundantly clear what Antoni feels for South Beach by the way he clearly defines the social structure of the place. Miami Beach was once a place where the older people came to die but Antoni gives us the new Miami where the young come to die from AIDS and where people of all classes and ages come to witness a new birth and remake their old selves.
The lives of the characters come together as Gabriel travels through his outrageous world of Miami of the 90’s. It is a world of quickly made fortunes, drugs, temptations, murder, sex, sex and more sex and a world in which man and women are bought and sold. It is here in South Beach that Gabriel Tucker unravels his family history and finds the soul that he never thought he had and a love that he never imagined that he deserved.
“South Beach” is nothing more than a fun read; there is nothing deep about it but in that it has value as do TV soap operas.
