The Wild Man
Warren, best known for The Front Runner, the ground-breaking  novel about a gay athlete, has created another gay sports figure  in her first work in four years. With his overweening machismo,  the complex hero, a closeted matador at the end of Franco's rule  in Spain, is never entirely sympathetic but always fascinating.  He is aware of the political and social changes of the 1960s but  must face the conflict between the demands of his aristocratic  family and the traditions of his sport, on the one hand, and his  growing love for an idealistic young peasant on the other.  Warren's overly romantic style sometimes threatens to turn this  into a romance novel. The depiction of gay life under a  right-wing dictatorship and the start of the ecological movement  in Spain are often more absorbing than the love stories. In  spite of stylistic flaws, Warren tells an absorbing story, and  his characters transcend stereotypes in a setting that will be  exotic to most American readers. For gay fiction and larger  popular fiction collections. Daniel Starr, Museum of Modern Art,  New YorkCopyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.