It’s the 1960s, and New York’s venerable Biedermeier hotel, a second-rate but genteel women’s residence, is, like the city around it, changing. Few patrons require the chaperones or house rules such institutions offer. Breakfast service has been suspended; rooms lie empty.
In his debut novel, “Women’s Hotel,” Daniel M. Lavery asks what it might have been like inside such an institution as it was being “made obsolete by the credit card, by hippies and the New Age movement, by lesbianism and feminism, by the increase in affordable apartment stock and the increased acceptance of premarital cohabitation.” Who might have lived there then — what aging respectable spinsters, sheltered throwbacks or shady runaways on the margins of modernity?
Historical fiction is hard to get right, pastiche even harder: too often employed as a lazy dodge to avoid the existential and plotting challenges posed by modern technology, or as an excuse to dress otherwise contemporary-minded characters up in period costumes. The ensuing vignettes set within the walls of the Biedermeier feel at times like an elaborate social experiment, at others like a piece of performance art, 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 was not off-putting to this reader — who among us doesn’t thrill to an itemized breakdown of the midcentury automat menu? — but in a time when allegory lurks behind every plot twist, I was braced for a heavy-handed message.
“Let this book be taken for no more than what it is,” Lavery writes in an author’s note: “a few impressions of a manner of living that was briefly possible for a small group of women in the middle decades of the last century.” But “Women’s Hotel” seems like something more, and something all too rare: a book written because it was exactly what the author wanted to read. There is a delicious, low-key madness to this project, but “Women’s Hotel” is undertaken with such gusto — and, frequently, such skill — that the reader has no choice but to surrender.
We meet the beleaguered Katherine, a sort of R.A. for the other residents; the mendacious Kitty; the jauntily modern Lucianne. There’s Gia (laser-focused on marrying her mother’s ex-boyfriend) and Stephen, the Cooper Union student and Biedermeier elevator operator who’s one of the building’s few male denizens. There is addiction and poverty and aching loneliness, the pain and joy of midcentury queerness, along with a description of a terrible, misleading haircut that’s one of the better things I’ve read this year.
Lavery’s obvious influences include not just Powell’s ennui but Rona Jaffe’s working gals, Joseph Mitchell, Flannery O’Connor, E.B. White, Barbara Pym and the entire green-spined Virago canon, as well as what has been termed “the feminine middlebrow novel.” I’d guess the author also likes Henry James and Edith Wharton, and certainly “Harriet the Spy.”
Those are some big shoes (high heels?) to fill, and Lavery occasionally stumbles. The prose sometimes becomes a touch labored, the droll omniscient narrator too knowing. That author’s note offers a misleading suggestion of diligent social history, whereas Lavery’s strength lies in world building.
What the arch comedy-of-manners format sacrifices in terms of character depth, Lavery compensates for with affection. Perhaps we don’t get a sense of Katherine beyond being something of a doormat, but within the spinster archetype are crystalline descriptions of alcoholism. An elderly tenant’s characterization may be as emaciated as her body; however, the sketch of her urban loneliness is tender. And if at moments there’s a whiff of the New-York Historical Society archives, the author’s real enthusiasm for his discovered relic is palpable.
As the narrator might put it, Lavery is a fine mimic with a splendid ear. The anachronisms stand out because they are so few. The dialogue has real sparkle, and lacks the mannered quality that can bedevil period fiction. On the subject of tearooms, Lavery is superb.
This is a snapshot not so much of some sepia dream of New York, but of a moment when the city held space for modest budgets and for living in a small way. Lavery never thinks less of his characters for the mistake of having been born in an era not our own, making “Women’s Hotel” a welcome place to stay.
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