Looking for Lazaro

Jack Kaiser is a professor of English at a Los Angeles community college. He presents himself as an enlightened, politically progressive metrosexual teaching courses with names like Film and Feminism. In his free time, however, he prowls the brothels of Tijuana and the sex-tourism hot spots of Cuba. Without his being consciously aware of it, his classroom lectures begin to turn into psychodramas in which he attempts to reconcile the contradictory worlds in which he lives. His life is brought to crisis when he busts a female student for plagiarism and she responds with a bogus sexual harassment charge that becomes a lawsuit. Kaiser, awaiting trial and seeking some kind of redemption, precipitously undertakes a mission to smuggle books into Cuba to deliver to a mysterious fellow named Lázaro Perdomo. His trip becomes an odyssey through Havana's sexual underground, a world of party girls, drag queens and Santería, and culminates with a final confrontation in a Los Angeles courtroom.


Genre: Literary Fiction