HOT FLASHES

by Barbara Raskin ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 1987

A pompous, unintentionally funny quartet novel with a spurious feminist veneer. Raskin (Loose Ends, The National Anthem, Out of Order) provides the usual four lifelong women friends, all of them Female Adult Depression Babies--meaning they will turn ""at least 50 by the end of the 80's"" (though it helps that each looks ten years younger than her age). But when writer Sukie Amram dies suddenly of a cerebral hemorrhage, the other three hurry to her Washington, D.C., home to mourn her. They are narrator Diana Sargeant, a professor of anthropology at Columbia (divorced); Elaine Cantor, former group radical, now gone to seed (husband left her for a yuppy); and Joanne Ireland, a ""flashy career woman of 43"" who writes Vogue articles (never married). The three sit around Sukie's kitchen and reminisce while a parade of visitors troops by (Sukie's 35-year-old hunk of a lover; a nerdy shrink and ex-lover who stops by guiltily for an X-rated videotape and is sternly humiliated by Diana; Sukie's ex-husband Nate--guilt in spades, etc.); they also discover Sukie's ""journal"" (""Walking this morning I felt fear spreading through me like a tide oozing across a beach, erasing the damp sand castle of my identity"") and read of her theatrical despair over the dissolution of her marriage. But the author's main intent seems to be, in an overserious way, to typify a generation. Thus, narrator Diana breaks off into pages and pages of first-person plural revery at the drop of a hat: ""We sought love in Paris, romance in Rome, drugs in Katmandu, God in the Orient, and sex in the South Pacific."" At the close, Sukie is finally planted--with an all-woman group of pall bearers doing the honors. All very dumb and trivializing.

Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1987

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1987

Categories: FICTION