Wives of Frankie Ferraro

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY MAY 4, 1998

Striving for glitz, Marchetta (Lovers and Friends, 1989) achieves only a rhinestone glare. The son of a working-class Italian couple looks for love, wealth and power through a series of marriages in this rambling romantic saga. Frankie Ferraro is ambitious, good-looking and an old-school romantic (e.g., he wouldn't hit a woman, and he'll always pay up when he makes a mistake). Although Frankie pulls himself up by his bootstraps (earning a fortune developing New York health clubs), he doesn't have much luck with love--especially with marriages. At 21 he weds Miranda, a flighty drug addict from a well-to-do Boston family, but differences in their backgrounds and expectations--plus her family's interference--drive them apart. His next wife, Annabel, is a hard-edged British aristocrat eager to manipulate Frankie (and everyone else) to get what she wants. The end of his second marriage leaves Frankie bitter. Then he learns that real love--friendship, not lust--has been right under his nose all along. Marchetta (who co-wrote two novels with Ivana Trump) bestows on Frankie a tender relationship with his daughter and endows him with a love of learning and an ethical business sense. None of this makes him appealing--he seems an egomaniacal lech. Marchetta's frequent naming of current songs, politicians and TV programs clutters an already overextended narrative. Paper-thin characters, a disjointed story and a predictable happy ending add up to a disappointing novel of one man's good intentions gone awry.