WOMEN’S HOTELby Daniel M. Lavery
It’s the 1960s, and New York’s venerable Biedermeier Hotel, a second-rate but genteel women’s residence, is changing, as is the city around it. Few patrons require the attendants or house rules that these establishments offer. Breakfast service has been suspended. the rooms are empty.
In his debut novel, Women’s Hotel, Daniel M. Lavery asks how he could have been inside such an institution since he had been “provided by the credit card, by the hippies and the New Age movement, by lesbianism and feminism, from the increase in affordable apartment stock and the increased acceptance of premarital cohabitation.” Who might have lived there then — which old respectable spinsters, sheltered fugitives, or shadowy escapees on the fringes of modernity?
Historical fiction is hard to get right, pastiche even harder: too often it’s used as a lazy way to avoid the existential and design challenges posed by modern technology, or as an excuse to dress characters in other modern period costumes. The vignettes that follow within Biedermeier’s walls are at times like an elaborate social experiment, at others like a performance piece or a long-form version of Lavery’s first book, the clever ‘Texts From Jane Eyre’, but in the style of Dawn Powell .
The gimmick wasn’t unpleasant for this reader – who among us doesn’t get excited by a midcentury auto menu breakdown? — but in an age when allegory lurks behind every plot twist, I was prepared for a heavy message.
“Let this book be taken only for what it is,” Lavery writes in an author’s note: “a few impressions of a way of life that was briefly possible for a small group of women in the middle decades of the last century. ” But “Women’s Hotel” feels like something more, and something very rare: a book written because it was exactly what the author wanted to read. There’s a tasteful, low-key madness to this work, but The Women’s Hotel is undertaken with such gusto—and, often, such skill—that the reader has no choice but to surrender.
We meet the beleaguered Katherine, an RA of sorts for the other residents. the fake kitty; the politely modern Luciana. There’s Gia (laser-focused on marrying her mother’s ex-boyfriend) and Stephen, the Cooper Union student and Biedermeier elevator operator who is one of the building’s few male residents. There’s addiction and poverty and aching loneliness, the pain and joy of midcentury weirdness, along with a description of a terrible, delusional haircut that’s one of the best things I’ve read this year.
Lavery’s obvious influences include not only Powell’s enthusiasm, but also Rona Jaffe’s working girls, Joseph Mitchell, Flannery O’Connor, EB White, Barbara Pym and the entire green-backed Virago canon, as well as what has been labeled “the middlebrow female novel.” I guess the author also likes Henry James and Edith Wharton, and definitely “Harriet the Spy”.
Those are some big shoes (high heels?) to fill, and Lavery stumbles occasionally. The prose sometimes becomes a touch laborious, the omniscient narrator very aware. This author’s note offers a deceptive suggestion of diligent social history, whereas Lavery’s strength lies in world-building.
What the arch comedy of manners scheme sacrifices in terms of character depth, Lavery makes up for it with affection. Perhaps we don’t get a sense of Katherine beyond being something of a doormat, but within the spinster archetype are crystal clear descriptions of alcoholism. An elderly lodger’s characterization can be as emaciated as her body. yet the sketch of urban solitude is tender. And if at times there is a whiff of the archives of the New York Historical Society, the author’s genuine enthusiasm for his discovered relic is palpable.
As the narrator might put it, Lavery is an excellent mimic with a great ear. Anachronisms stand out because they are so few. The dialogue has a real sparkle and lacks the formulaic quality that can bedevil period fiction. On the subject of teapots, Lavery is great.
This is a snapshot not so much of some sepia New York dream, but of a time when the city had room for modest budgets and a small life. Lavery never holds his characters to account for the mistake of being born in an era that is not ours, making “Women’s Hotel” a welcome place to stay.
WOMEN’S HOTEL | By Daniel M. Lavery | HarperVia | 256 pp. | $28.99