"Macho Camacho's Beat" is a funny, mordant first novel about modern-day Puerto Rico…. It comes to us with high praise from Gabriel García Márquez, Piri Thomas, Juan Goytisolo and José Yglesias, who calls Sánchez "a regular Philip Roth let loose on the island." But to me Sánchez seems closer to the Russian symbolist, Andrei Bely, than to Philip Roth. Like Bely's "Petersburg," "Macho Camacho's Beat" snakes through an urban landscape (here it is San Juan) that feels like a nightmare of poisonous quills. It's a novel that lives more in tones and moods than in specific characters—an extended, raucous song.

The novel floats from character to character, while the salsa beat of pop singer Macho Camacho, "Life Is a Phenomenal Thing," begins to strangle San Juan with its noise and sexual invitation….

Sánchez gives us a sense of an island culture awash...