The Havana Room

by Colin Harrison

Book Overview

The Havana Room is the tale of a man from his fall from the heights of power and wealth in New York to the moment where he might well die. Bill Wyeth is a successful real-estate attorney in his late thirties with a wife and son, who, by the merest chance, loses everything: family, job, status. Unmoored and alone, Wyeth drifts toward the city's darker corners. Restoration seems unlikely, redemption impossible, when Wyeth finds himself in an old-time...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0374299862
• ISBN13: 9780374299866
• Release Date: January 2004
• Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux
• Length: 400 Pages
• Weight: 1.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 6.4" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Thoroughly enjoyable

This is a multi-layered urban thriller. The story is excellent and Mr. Harrison neatly ties up every loose thread, but what may be more interesting is the off beat commentary on life in the early 21st century. This book is for those who believe that "The wings of a butterfly can change the world." Highly recommended.

A Fast-Paced, Intelligent Urban Thriller

I had never read any of Colin Harrison's prior New York-based novels, and I picked up The Havana Room after stumbling across some favorable reviews. I must say this was an impressive read, and his style is instantly catching. The book reminded me a little of Tom Wolfe (although about 300 pages lighter than a typical Wolfe tome), and maybe a better-written version of Jay McInerny. The book starts out with a bang, as high-powewed Manhattan attorney Bill Wyeth comes home early from a trip, and unwittingly causes a tragedy involving a child sleeping over his house for his son's birthday. The fallout from the event is swift and extraordinary, (yet believable), and soon Wyeth is on his own, without a job, and with his high-brow society friends shunning him as if he had the plague. You can't help but think of Conrad from Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities. I thought the book would then disintegrate into a tale of a plucky lawyer forced to start over again and pull himself together when everything has been taken from him, and frankly wasn't looking forward to the rest. What a pleasant surprise. Instead the book got much more interesting, as Wyeth gets entangled in the lives of Jay Rainey and Allison Sparks (who he meets at a swank Manhattan steakhouse where he finds comfort in a routine of daily visits). Allison asks Bill to help her boyfriend Jay Rainey close a mysterious business deal, involving Jay's hasty purchase of a run down office building in exchange for some prime waterfront farmland on the North Fork of Long Island. The more he learns about Allison, Jay, and both properties, the more Wyeth realizes he doesn't know, and the rest of the novel involves him peeling back the layers of mystery that surround the secrets buried at the farm, the curious interest Jay had in the office building, the secret passages in Jay's diary and his bizarre mood swings, and the ultra-confidential monthly gatherings in the restaurant's top-secret, invitation only "Havana Room." I must confess that I was a little underwhelmed with the sercrets of the Havana Room when those mysteries were ultimately revealed, but the actions in the room ultimately were crucial to the plot, and so I wasn't too disappointed. Ultimately Harrison wraps things up rather nicely, tying up loose ends and revealing most of the secrets of the book. While the novel worked on many levels, (some reviewers mentioned it as some kind of fable regarding the excesses of our society), I thought ultimately the over-riding theme of the novel involved the special, enduring bond that a parent has for his/her children. I couldn't wait to get to it every night, and blew through it in very short order. You will be hooked by page 25.

This Could Be Colin Harrison's Breakthrough Novel

There has been a lot of prepublication buzz about THE HAVANA ROOM by Colin Harrison. Everything you may have heard about this novel is true. It will be superglued to your hands, and to your mind, from practically the minute you begin reading it. There is only one way that I can describe how good it really is. After opening the book one morning and reading the first 319 pages in one sitting, I set the book down, shoveled the ice off of the driveway, and ran a few errands, all the while wondering how it would end. I simply wanted to make the experience of reading this spellbinding novel last a bit longer; I did not want it to end.The most important lesson that one can learn about life is that every act carries its own potential for disaster, and that while there are ways to cut the odds, the house holds all the cards. This is a lesson that Bill Wyeth learns, at the cost of dear coin, in THE HAVANA ROOM.Wyeth is a fabulously successful real estate attorney, still on the ascending arc of a brilliant career, when he commits an act of simple, almost offhand, courtesy that results in personal disaster. Within weeks he has lost his job, his family and his respect, while each day tolls his ever-deeper descent into his personal maelstrom.The unplanned randomness of his life finds him entering a Manhattan steak house --- we never really learn its name --- where he finds himself slowly drawn into the web of Allison Sparks, the restaurant's attractive, enigmatic manager, and the Havana Room, a separate room in the restaurant where entrance is on an invitation-only basis and where what goes on is a closely held secret.Wyeth and Sparks slowly form a conversational relationship, a relationship that begins a fateful culmination on the day that Sparks asks Wyeth to represent her friend, Jay Rainey, in a real estate transaction that must be concluded by midnight of that day. Wyeth has reservations about the transaction and his role in the matter almost from the beginning. The transaction, which amounts to a land swap involving a Manhattan building for some prime Long Island acreage owned by Rainey, brings Wyeth closer to Sparks at the price of ensnaring him in a mysterious, complex scenario that accelerates his downward spiral.Wyeth is buffeted by a number of complex forces, among them a powerful Chilean businessman, a frightening hip-hop mogul, a farmer found frozen to a bulldozer and, most significantly, Rainey's obsessions, including his peculiar fixation on a fourteen-year-old British girl. The nexus connecting these seemingly disparate elements is ultimately located in THE HAVANA ROOM, where the denouement has the potential to ultimately result in disaster or redemption.One of the most fascinating elements of THE HAVANA ROOM is the way in which Harrison keeps the plates containing different plot threads spinning while hypnotizing the reader to the extent that one can still see them rotating long after the book is done, and Harrison has taken his plates and pol

Couldn't Put It Down

I usually have no problem putting books down but this one kept me reading when I had a lot of other things I should have been doing. Not great literature but very entertaining with believable dialogue.

Finally a Literary Page Turner

Colin Harrison's latest novel, The Havana Room, finally fulfills our need for a mystery with "must-turn-the-page" excitement combined with elegant and literary prose. Bill Wyeth is a hero for our times, a Manhattan lawyer who loses it all and believes he might even deserve it. Following Wyeth's descent into the habits of those New Yorker's who don't live on Park Avenue, yet constitute the heartbeat of this city, is a trip worth taking. To those who complain the plot is "unbelieveable", I can only say read the Times if you must be entertained by reality. I will take a trip to the Havana Room anytime.