Cristobal manages to maintain his daily dose of sex, finding partners at wakes and even among the nurses in the maternity ward where his wife delivers Gabriel. This leads him to pursue the beautiful teen-age daughter of Pablo Baron, Amanda Camila, the only female he is sure hasn't fallen to his father. The novel is overladen, though, with direct, and sometimes crude, discussions of physical intimacy, whose effect is not always engaging. Pablo carries it around in his wallet as a good-luck charm. This episode encapsulates the novel's singular attitude toward sex and friendship.
Friendship is more important than sex.
That lasts, and that's what we live for. This is a Latin American novel written in English, and its sensibility is a cross between the macho masculinism of the barrio and the street smarts of New York. The author never quite manages a settled narrative voice for his young protagonist, who veers between lyricism in the finest Latin American tradition and its opposite. Poetic prose is too often undermined by jarringly crude language. If Joseph Conrad is right in demanding that a work of art should carry its justification in every line, then ''The Nanny and the Iceberg'' does not quite measure up to the standards we are entitled to expect from Dorfman.