BookBrowse Reviews Women's Hotel by Daniel M. Lavery

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An oddball cast of characters scrape by at a rundown residential hotel for women in 1960s New York City.

In the 1920s–1960s, the Barbizon Hotel for Women was a residential hotel where respectable upper-middle-class and well-off working women could live in New York City on their own while maintaining their respectability. Its denizens consisted of fashion models, future starlets, writers, and other career-oriented and successful women.

The Biedermeier is not the Barbizon. In his debut novel Women's Hotel, Daniel M. Lavery introduces readers to a less glamorous, fictionalized version of the residential hotels for women popular in mid-century New York City (see Beyond the Book). Instead of future Hollywood stars, it is populated by a motley crew of lovable outcasts: Katherine is the hotel's first-floor director (something of a combination babysitter and resident advisor) and a recovering alcoholic from Westerville, Ohio; Lucianne is a magazine writer with big dreams of nice things and a nice man but less keen on actually settling down and marrying one; Pauline is a socialist-anarchist bent on convincing the rest of the hotel that there is no greater sin than productivity; Gia has come to New York to marry the man her mother is in love with. Each character is enthralling in their own way, and even those we spend the least amount of time with are quite memorable. J.D., for instance, is a particular highlight—an older woman who has been writing a biography of George Sand for as long as anyone can remember and adopts a stray orange cat who appears on her fire escape one day, christening him William Rufus.

Lavery has clearly researched the era; the world of 1960s Manhattan and the "working girls" (as the proprietor of the hotel lovingly thinks of them) who were setting out to make a life and a living for themselves are brought to startlingly vivid life, devoid of stereotype. He focuses the novel most closely on Katherine (we follow her for the first 100 or so pages) but later slips in and out of the lives of other residents. A great deal of the novel's pathos comes through getting to know her, and Lavery captures the stark reality of alcoholism and its repercussions with sensitivity, including how support groups like Alcoholics Anonymous can give a truly desperate person a new lease on life: "[Katherine] managed to lead many a shaky newcomer through the first few steps herself; in so doing she discovered the real pleasure that came from being of use to other people."

The novel unfolds in a somewhat meandering manner, like a slice-of-life series of scenes rather than a tightly plotted story. But what seems like a casual recounting of disparate events aligns into a deceptively complete and carefully crafted narrative. What's more, the deadpan comedic tone throughout leaves one unprepared for an emotionally impactful ending. It's an effective management of mood—it takes a turn for the serious without becoming bleak. The characters with sad stories are never entirely hopeless. For instance, when one of the elder women of the hotel is encouraged to move to a nursing home to stave off starvation after breakfast service is discontinued, she decides to turn to shoplifting instead. This kind of can-do attitude is a mainstay and necessity for the ladies of the Biedermeier.

The most winning quality of Women's Hotel is Lavery's humor, particularly as it manifests in satirical commentary on a time before second-wave feminism and other liberation struggles really took root in the collective consciousness. Lucianne feels no aversion toward Dolly and Nicola, the two known lesbians of the hotel, she just doesn't understand them:

"Girls were cheap and men were valuable, and that was all there was to it...It was like trying to make a living as a poet or something: possibly all right for a girl with a lot of money...But what were two girls with no money supposed to do for each other? Not to each other—that much seemed self-evident and straightforward—but for. Where would they get their dinners? Who was going to pay for it? And who in the world was going to sell it to them?"

With whipsmart snappy dialogue, borderline cartoonish scenarios, and Lavery's wry narration, Women's Hotel reads like a confection at the outset. But its portraits of women striving—be it for success, for survival, for love or friendship, or in Katherine's case, for one day at a time—are affecting beyond what one might initially expect. It bursts with life.

This review first ran in the October 16, 2024 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.