Mr. Ives' Christmas

The signal event of this novel--the shooting of the protagonist's son--is announced early, and the rest of the book is imbued with a melancholy only occasionally illuminated by spiritual revelation or insight. Edward Ives is a foundling, adopted by a widowed print shop manager and raised uneventfully in an idyllic--though Depression-era--New York City of egg creams, stickball and melting-pot color. Ives's dark looks and his father's long history of working amiably with Cuban pressmen incline him toward a sympathy with Hispanics and their culture, which conveniently anchors Hijuelos in a world he knows well. As a child, Ives shows a penchant for drawing, and he meets his future wife, Annie MacGuire, in a class at the Art Students League. Their first child, Robert (or Roberto), born in 1950, is murdered at age 17 on the streets of New York by a Puerto Rican teenager. The case is celebrated--Robert had just decided to enter the priesthood and was killed for a measly $10; by his side was found a shopping bag full of record albums--Christmas presents carefully chosen for each member of his family. In his Pulitzer Prize-winning The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, Hijuelos showed he can sharply evoke a vibrant, multicultural New York, capturing its music, its menace and its smell. Here, however, every storefront is darkened by the grief of Edward Ives, and every note is tamped. It is as if the lovelorn Nestor of Mambo Kings has returned from the dead to play his sad arias in a world--and a book--absent his lively, spirited brother, Cesar. The author's attempts to render all this as a Dickensian tale of redemption through dignified suffering--Dickens is invoked more than a dozen times--are crude and work no wonders. Not even a long-foreshadowed and deferred meeting at the end of the book between Ives and his son's murderer helps: ``Nothing monumental transpired. Niceties were exchanged.'' Same for the book. BOMC selection; author tour. (Nov.)