THE WILD ROSE

From the author of Rightfully Yours (1989) and First Born (1987), another commercial stew—or rather a goulash, since the subject is chiefly 20th-century Hungary—with a dash of concert- hall music and Washington skulduggery thrown in for seasoning. Mortman's wild rose is the daughter of a famous Hungarian violinist, Zoltan Gaspar, whose nonpareil hands were wrecked by a zealous officer at a Stalinist concentration camp. But Katalin, a child prodigy at the piano, carries on the family name by winning the Salzburg competition and earning a scholarship to Juilliard. In New York she reconnoiters with handsome young Steven Kardos, a hero in the Children's Army during the l953 uprising, then American immigrant and Vietnam Green Beret. But their hot young love gets nipped in the bud when Katalin's called back to Budapest to attend to her ailing mother and can't get permission to leave Hungary after Maria Gaspar dies. So she plays behind the Iron Curtain, dallies with dissidents and gypsies, and marries the Communist hard-liner Major Laszlo Bohm. Meanwhile, Steven goes to law school, weds the dauntlessly wicked Cynthia Rhinehart, and heads to Washington as a congressman. Of course, their paths cross again, now at a Kennedy Center concert (with Bernstein conducting, no less), leading Steven to maneuver himself into the Hungarian ambassadorship—from which post he plots the overthrow of Bohm and the long-delayed attainment of Katalin. Plot and settings are decently handled, but there's no excuse for the way this novel runs on: 750-plus pages are larded with unenthralling secondary characters and long scenes whose gist could have been handled in a paragraph—making this more of an endurance test than a read, even for people who have absolutely nothing planned for the summer.