HOPE DIAMOND REFUSES

by Iris Owens ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 23, 1984

Less funny, less outrageous, and even less emotionally sympathetic than the vulgar/zesty After Claude (1973), this flimsy follow-up again features a sardonic, wisecracking Jewish heroine with romantic problems. And at the very start narrator Hope Diamond (age circa 35) is in fine kvetching form, complaining about married lover Leo--an uptown restaurateur who brings his Greenwich Village mistress salami instead of sapphires. But then, while Hope is dumping Leo and drooling over her equally swinish new bedmate (sportswriter Rush), her past comes back to convulse her. Joanne is in town! Who's Joanne, you ask? None other than the dear friend who, some years back, stole Hope's young husband Babi--a.k.a. Prince Baharam of Ustan, then a rebel/student in the USA. So why isn't Joanne in Ustan, happily enjoying palace life, princess-dom, and motherhood? Because, as she tells the very unsympathetic Hope, Babi has become ""cruel and sadistic and a monster and I've left him. . . and I left my son, my Abbas."" To Hope's disgust, whiny Joanne moves into the apartment above her own. (The landlady, another obnoxious type, is a mutual friend and flaky heiress.) Furthermore, it's Hope who winds up nursing Joanne when she succumbs to illness and accident. Finally, then, in the novel's droopy last third, Hope impulsively and implausibly sells the landlady's rug for plane fare, flies to Ustan, and endeavors to win back the wife-deserted Babi. But what she finds in Ustan, of course (aside from a few tepid gags), is disillusionment: at the end she'll really be over Babi (who's into opium and concubines) at last. Some lively shtick, especially at the beginning--but the mixture of farce and sentimentality wears thin fast here, making this a disappointment for fans of bold comedy. . . if passable entertainment for the Nora Ephron/Gail Parent audience.

Pub Date: May 23, 1984

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1984

Categories: FICTION