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A Novel
by Daniel M. Lavery
Book Reviewed by:From the New York Times bestselling author and advice columnist, a poignant and funny debut novel about the residents of a women's hotel in 1960s New York City.
The Beidermeier might be several rungs lower on the ladder than the real-life Barbizon, but its residents manage to occupy one another nonetheless. There's Katherine, the first-floor manager, lightly cynical and more than lightly suggestible. There's Lucianne, a workshy party girl caught between the love of comfort and an instinctive bridling at convention, Kitty the sponger, Ruth the failed hairdresser, and Pauline the typesetter. And there's Stephen, the daytime elevator operator and part-time Cooper Union student.
The residents give up breakfast, juggle competing jobs at rival presses, abandon their children, get laid off from the telephone company, attempt to retrain as stenographers, all with the shared awareness that their days as an institution are numbered, and they'd better make the most of it while it lasts.
As trenchant as the novels of Dawn Powell and Rona Jaffe and as immersive as The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and Lessons in Chemistry, Women's Hotel is a modern classic—and it is very, very funny.
Chapter One
THE END OF BREAKFAST
It was the end of the continental breakfast, and therefore the beginning of the end of everything else. For thirty-five years, every Biedermeier girl whose rent for the coming week had found its way to Mrs. Mossler's crocheted lantern-bag could go to sleep secure in the knowledge that she would wake up with a breakfast tray slid into the recess of her door, delivered just as advertised, "silently and gratuitously, no waiting—no waiter!" During the war the fourteendollar rent was raised to eighteen dollars, then again to twenty-five dollars after Carmine DeSapio replaced Hugo Rogers as the head of Tammany, Mrs. Mossler certain that a non-Irish Tammany boss was a harbinger of the rising prices, social upheaval, and general chaos soon to come. But the Biedermeier's daily rendezvous between tray and door never failed, not even on Sundays, and aside from a wartime substitution of Postum for coffee, the menu had remained implacably untouched by time. One'...
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...continued
Full Review
(725 words)
(Reviewed by Lisa Butts).
In Women's Hotel, Daniel Lavery introduces readers to the fictional Biedermeier, which is based on the real-life phenomenon of residential hotels for women only that existed in New York City throughout the 20th century. As women began working outside the home on a mass scale, they traveled in droves to the city to make lives for themselves, but there was still a social stigma surrounding the prospect of a woman living alone, and/or in the vicinity of men. The women's hotel, something like a dormitory, was viewed as a more respectable option, without being as didactic as the religious-run "moral homes," which required women to follow a list of behavioral rules and attend regular worship services. Typically, residents of these hotels were...
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