Oscar's Winner

Get out your flamingo-pink tie, pull your hair into a pompadour, then clack your claves in threetwo time: if the mambo isn't coming back, you'll wish it were after reading The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux), Oscar Hijuelos's homy and soulful tale of two musician brothers from Cuba living in New York during the 1940s and 1950s. Written in plush, enchanted prose, this novel is an elegiac tribute to an era when men with fanciful names like Xavier Cugat, P6rez Prado, and, of course, Desi Amaz (he and Lucy make brief appearances in the book) entered the American musical mainstream, playing a hip-swaying, jungly jazz that had the coolest cats going "cha-cha-cha."

J.R.