The publication of still another high-quality novel in the postrevolutionary era (1989-) may encourage some cultural-studies devotees to reconsider their hostility toward “elite literature.” Along with Carlos Fuentes, Abel Posse, Sergio Ramírez, Julio Escoto, and many others who have published outstanding works in the past decade, Mario Vargas Llosa has, with his latest effort, written a fascinating, well-documented novel based on Latin American history. Unlike Carpentier's Recurso del método, García Márquez's Otofio del patriarca, and several other novels that create a multinational synthesis of the archetypal dictator, La fiesta del chivo deals specifically and realistically with perhaps the most tyrannical of all Latin American dictators, Rafael Leonidas Trujillo of the Dominican Republic (r. 1930-61).

The novel's three alternating series of chapters are anchored in 1961, the year of Trujillo's assassination. However, in keeping with the modernist and Boom tradition, the entire regime of the dictator, including its international relations, is captured with both a wide-angle and a zoom lens. The Trujillo-centered chapters emphasize El Jefe's personal traits; his indebtedness to U.S. Marine Sergeant Simon Gittleman for having taught him discipline and punctuality; President John F. Kennedy's opposition to him for his attempts to assassinate Venezuelan President Rómulo Betancourt, plus the fear that an anti-Trujillo movement might follow the Fidel Castro model; Argentine Juan Perón's 1955 warning to Trujillo to beware of antagonizing the Church (the Church's campaign against him started in January 1960); his most egregious crimes, including the 1937 border massacre of thousands of Haitians, the disappearance in New York City of Columbia professor Jesús Galíndez, and the death of the Mirabal sisters; his contempt for his immediate family (brothers, sons, and wife), except for his mother, the ninety-six-year-old Julia Molina; and his closest sycophantic collaborators, whom he maintains on a tight leash. El Jefe is extremely adroit at anticipating the slightest hint of disloyalty, but at age seventy he is deeply troubled by his inability to control his incipient incontinence and impotence, which blemish his obsessive cleanliness and virility.

The conspirators-focused chapters are filled with suspense. As they wait in their car for Trujillo's 1957 Chevrolet to pass by on the way to the Casa de Caoba in San Cristóbal, his favorite place for seducing adolescents, their individual motives for wanting to assassinate El Chivo are revealed. The actual assassination takes place in chapter 12, the midpoint of the novel, but this series of chapters continues through chapter 23, reporting the pursuit, capture, torture, and death of almost all the conspirators at the hands of Secret Service Chief Johnny Abbes García and Trujillo's son Ramfís and his brothers. The carefully planned plot to establish a transitional military-civilian junta fails because of the indecisiveness of General José René “Pupo” Román.

The third series of chapters follows Dr. Urania Cabral, who has returned to Santo Domingo in 1996 for the first time since leaving precipitously at age fourteen in 1961. The daughter of Senator Agustín “Cerebrito” Cabral, one of Trujillo's most trusted collaborators, Urania has unexpectedly come home to visit her invalid father, whom she hates passionately. Although the reader suspects early on in the novel the reason for her hatred, the tension is maintained until the final chapter, when Urania reveals to her aunt and cousins the gruesome details of the “fiesta del Chivo,” her private encounter with the seventy-year-old, impotent Jefe in his infamous Casa de Caoba. For some undefined reason, Senator Cabral had fallen out of favor with El Jefe, and he reluctantly allowed himself to be inveigled into abjectly offering up his truly beloved daughter as a token of his loyalty.

One of the novel's most interesting developments is the emergence of Joaquín Balaguer after Trujillo's assassination. He is the only Trujillo collaborator who is unfathomable, and therefore not vulnerable, to the dictator. A diminutive intellectual, poet, and bachelor, the unctuous and chaste Balaguer does not drink, smoke, or eat. Because of his apparent lack of ambition, Trujillo named him president in 1957. However, after the assassination, Balaguer cleverly outwits El Jefe's other collaborators as well as the latter's son Ramfís and his brothers in a series of tense confrontations in the presidential office. Balaguer was subsequently elected president on three different occasions, and three months after the novel was published, the Los Angeles Times reported that Balaguer, at age ninety-three, legally blind and virtually deaf, might win the 2000 presidential election. Although he did not win the election, he is clearly the leading candidate for the Oscar as best supporting actor in this blockbuster work, which has already received well-deserved acclaim as one of Vargas Llosa's four best novels, along with La casa verde, Conpersación en la Catedral, and La guerra del fin del mundo.