Grace Lavery / Joseph Lavery & Daniel M. Lavery / Mallory Ortberg - "Straight with extra steps" couple trooning out to avoid "dwindling into mere heterosexuality"

[Wonderland foster child]

Women's Hotel non-review
Chapter Ten: Ubi Sunt

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/education/glossary/ubi-sunt

We're finally discussing options for The End of Breakfast, a topic last discussed in chapter 2. We're now nearly two-thirds of the way through the novel. The pacing here makes icebergs look as though they skip like lambs.

Alas, breakfast is well and truly gone, and the hotel's women steal from the dinner offerings and illicitly make coffee in their rooms and convince men to take them for lunch and make slugs to save money on the subway.

Most of the chapter is about 70-year-old Josephine's genteel womanly poverty, and how she has no options (apart from starvation) until she decides to steal cash. It's a poignant depiction and not encumbered with backstory; there's even a conversation between Josephine and her older sister which is entertaining! (That sister "possessed that singular talent for reminding her that the world was a cruel and hard place, which all eldest sisters seem to possess from birth." Shade against Mallory's older sister?)

 

[Bookwork]

Joe's politics are heavily colored by his most cherished pasttime: Disdain.

Mallory has published an ode to humble bragging with extra cuteness. From IG:

Spoiler: Text

All I want is to become well and truly humbled by my success this year.

I've already been humbled by mmy failures and ordinariness, so for this year, I think I would prefer only to be humbled by my success. I would be very humble about it. It would probably be the making of me.

"Have you noticed," people would say, "how much humbler Danny seems to have grown this year? And he was pretty humble already, I thought." And I would be all the humbler for my tremendous success. It woud make me stop and appreciate all the simple things. Which I already do, being pretty humble to begin with, but now the things I appreciate are even simpler: Buttons, shoelaces, plain toast, cotton socks, generic facial tissues, lightbulbs, and so on.

Caption:

Text: "i just want you to be HUMBLED by SUCCESS already!! more at thechatner dotcom"

The Chattner full-length cuteness:

Spoiler: Text

All I want is to become well and truly humbled by my success this year.

I’ve already been humbled by my failures and ordinariness, so for this year, I think I would prefer only to be humbled by my success. I would be very humble about it. It would probably be the making of me.

“Have you noticed,” people would say, “how much humbler Danny seems to have grown this year? And he was pretty humble already, I thought.” And I would be all the humbler for my tremendous success. It would make me stop and appreciate all the simple things. Which I already do, being pretty humble to begin with, but now the things I appreciate are even simpler: Buttons, shoelaces, plain toast, cotton socks, generic facial tissues, lightbulbs, and so on.

All I want is to experience so much overwhelming, undeniable success this year that I have no choice but to become incredibly easy-going, retiring, and humble in the face of it. No one would begrudge me all that success, because of how much character I would cultivate as a result.

“If any other member of my acquaintance racked up this kind of success in a single year,” people would say, “I would cheerfully cut their throats as soon as say hello. But with him, I don’t seem to mind it so much, on account of how humble he is about it.” Yes, everyone would agree that I carry it well, just like when I put on weight seasonally. and that while they would like to be jealous of all my success, they simply can’t bring themselves to feel it, because I’ve hardly even noticed the success.

I won’t pretend the success isn’t there. This is my solemn promise. I won’t pretend to notice all the awards, the citations for excellence, the grants and the stipends and the endowed chairs, the conferment of decorations and distinctions, the inductions into various fraternal orders, the keys to various cities, and so on. That would be an insult to the people around me, and I wouldn’t do that to you. But I will acknowledge it once, lightly, and then carry on.

I just want to experience so much success in the next calendar year that I become perfectly polite, perfectly patient, and perfectly at ease with all circumstances for the rest of my life. I’ll be so generous, so open-minded, so free from pettiness, resentment, and irritibility, that even my greatest enemies will openly pattern their conduct after mine, “because he knows how to live — he has been made more humble by his success.”

If for some reason this is not possible — if the success is not available, or already earmarked for somebody else — then I would like to receive no success at all, and try again next year. The thing I would like least is to receive a little bit of success this year, not so much that anyone thinks humility is called for. I would rather be in a number of low-speed car crashes, or develop a new food allergy, than experience a moderate amount of success this year. Please God, let me be so successful this year that people start asking me how I stay humble. I don’t think I can stand it otherwise.

More book touring, including another jaunt to NY:

• Wed, Nov 13, 2pm - A talk about midcentury domestic fiction at Sarah Lawrence (which is open to the public, not just students), Bronxville, NY.
• Tues, Nov 19, 7pm - Reading at Prairie Lights Bookstore, Iowa City, IA.
• Wed, Nov 20, 8pm - Zooming with Roxane Gay for the Audacity Book Club.
• Sat, Nov 30, 6pm - Conversing with Austin Channing Brown, Ann Arbor District Library, 1st floor lobby.
• February - Savannah Book Festival.
• March - Tucson Festival of Books.

Rocco, meanwhile, has started getting by with only two naps a day.

 

[TheMeanOne]

She makes me really sad. I...ugh Mallory. If you actually feel humbled take a financial literacy class. And Joe's whole thing has been not just "humbling" her but humiliating her. He spent all her money. He knocked someone other than his wife up. She's still not getting it. He doesn't love her, he's doing this on purpose.

 

[Wonderland foster child]

Women's Hotel non-review
Chapter Eleven: “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came”

Katherine goes to a hairdresser to get her disasterous haircut fixed but it is only made worse. She realises she should be able to phone her mother about this, but the gulf between them is too wide. Almost painful to read this, given Mallory's own estrangement.

Lucianne grills Gia about wanting to marry her mother's ex-boyfriend. Gia doesn't mind giving up her career as a dancer as she can always dance at parties.

Flashback to when Lucianne and Stephen (the elevator guy) slept together, even though he's "predominantly homosexual", but they're jolly pals now.

Backstory about Stephen being homosexual, and still nominally a college student.

...and that's it.

 

[Free the Pedos]

That picture of Daniel holding the baby his second wife gave birth to and his first wife cares for really says everything about trans women, doesn’t it?

 

[AirdropShitposts]

Joe shares some more of his Big Thoughts. This time, he contemplates the evils of liberal democracy.


link | archive

Spoiler: genuinely shaking

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The amount of fallacies in this short piece is incredible. Remarkable even. I think my favorite is that Joe doesn't even see the central fallacy even as he, for him, concisely illustrates it after all his personal psychoanalysis projecting. I think you could argue that he's doing both the fallacy of division and the fallacy of composition at the same time, then expressing anger at the result.

But the shorter version is that it's just narcissism. Joe is doing what I remarked on a few days or ago or last week or whatever. He's establishing impossible standards so he can criticize one method as illegitimate even though he offers no alternative solution to the problem: decision making by millions, if not billions in the future, of people.

We already know he rejects the other alternative for being even more democratic: the market.

Another problem is that he's framing the results of multiple choices over time as if they result from being made deliberately through a single existential one at a single point in time. Lots of simpletons do this constantly because it gives them the illusion of control. This is also one of his past objections to the market though he expresses it strangely through his consumer fashion purchases.

 

[Bookwork]

Flashback to when Lucianne and Stephen (the elevator guy) slept together

Did Mallory write a sex scene?

 

[Constellationzero]

If you actually feel humbled take a financial literacy class.

If you actually feel humbled take a financial literacy class

Fixed that for you.

 

[AMHOLIO]

...and that's it.

I hate to say it, but the book sounds terribly boring and dull for the most part. Are there any themes or character arcs holding things together? Or is this an ant colony that Mallory sometimes gives interesting motivations and stories to, fixating on the intricacies of the ant tunnels more?

 

[Wonderland foster child]

Women's Hotel non-review
Chapter Twelve: A Quick Trip Downtown

I haven't had to deal with spoilers yet, but I'll use the tags for the benefit of those also reading along, because there is plot in this here chapter!

Spoiler

Katherine gets arrested for pretending to be Kitty! The similar names really did have a purpose after all! Apparently Kitty has a rap sheet, and her summons had nothing to do with jury service. (From Chapter Two: "It was not at all clear what the original letter had been about; Kitty made it sound as though it were something minor and mundane, like jury duty, although she had been careful to explain that it wasn’t jury duty, only something very much like it.") More about "criminal nuisance, disorderly conduct, loitering in the first degree, petty larceny, prior failure to appear". Katherine ends up chained to a bench before being carted off to prison.

Kitty, it turns out, had got into trouble in a Midtown bar, but no one's sure what the actual story was since even the beat cop was not entirely sober.

Katherine phones the hotel collect and talks to Pauline (the #acab anarchist), who rustles up support and bail money and feels very proud about that.

There's a real camaraderie shown among the hotel women without losing sight of their individual personalities. If this had been the majority of the book, it might well have been the knockout people want it to be.

Meanwhile Ruth, who gave Katherine the bad haircut, asks Mrs Mossler for a job as a maid. Mrs M. hardly wants to hire anyone for anything, given the hotel's financial issues, but can't bring herself to say no.

Spoiler

Katherine has a reasonable time in jail and is bailed out by Tobias, the poor anarchist.

They banter and go out for hot dogs. Then Katherine goes home and slaps Kitty and apologises.

*****

To answer previous questions: no sex scene (that I recall, but I'm pretty sure I would), and I suppose there are themes of women's isolation in a harsh urban environment and the ways in which they survive, but a lot of it is description and backstory and tangents rather than character development/forward movement. Obviously some authors can make the most mundane aspects of life riveting, but that isn't the case here. Some of the backstory is interesting but we are here to read about what's happening to the characters in their present time, so it's just a slog at times. Katherine would be the most likely person to have a character arc, but even she doesn't.

 

[AMHOLIO]

lation in a harsh urban environment and the ways in which they survive, but a lot of it is description and backstory and tangents rather than character development/forward movement. Obviously some authors can make the most mundane aspects of life riveting, but that isn't the case here. Some of the backstory is interesting but we are here to read about what's happening to the characters in their present time, so it's just a slog at times. Katherine would be the most likely person to have a character arc, but even she doesn't.

This sounds like eating a bowl of unseasoned overcooked oatmeal with occassional apple chunks in it. At least it isn't the mind-meltingly horrible prose of Gretchen Felkner-Martin, but it's still painful. I wonder what the hell the end goal of the book will be?

 

[Bookwork]

no sex scene (that I recall, but I'm pretty sure I would)

Alas, our man Dan's having been the hawt dood at orgies before being the cuck in the attic eavesdropping on the bouncy castle below couldn't enliven Lucianne's memories of making it to the top floor with the gay elevator operator. Even Joe's countless thirsty recruiting posts sparked no literary fire. Sad.

 

[MirnaMinkoff]

Alas, our man Dan's having been the hawt dood at orgies before being the cuck in the attic eavesdropping on the bouncy castle below couldn't enliven Lucianne's memories of making it to the top floor with the gay elevator operator. Even Joe's countless thirsty recruiting posts sparked no literary fire. Sad.

Joe convinced Mallory that shoving his man hand in her mouth was hawt stuff. It would be interesting to see what her imagination would envision as a sex scene in a book.

The mouth fist photo really should be used as the head shot on every “about the author” blurb for Daniel Lavery. It’s truly the photo that visually encapsulates everything about her state of existence.

 

[mold]

a basic problem with the hotel book is that her inspiration is 100% British (Dodie Smith as I’ve previously mentioned, Muriel Sparks, Mollie Panter-Downes, Margaret Kennedy, Stella Gibbons) but she decided to set the book in NYC for some reason. this probably won’t matter to her audience because they are niggercattle but I, an intellectual, am annoyed by the anageographism.

In the postwar period, we didn’t have the same class system. We didn’t have postwar food rationing. We had so much more economic opportunity for women (because of which everything having to do with sexuality worked differently- prostitution, lesbian subcultures, single motherhood) but there’s something even more critical.

The UK lost so many young men in WW1 that there was a gigantic population of women in that generation who never married. This affects literally every aspect of life there in the 20th century and it’s particularly basic to women’s hotels, which were run and populated by sane, energetic, normal people who just had the bad luck to have been young during WW1.

There are no small piece of ivory, carefully observed novels of manners about women’s residences in the US. There’s comedies and art about grotesque sex murders.

 

[Bookwork]

Lily's Caption:

Unnatural Mallory did not deserve mention.

Comments:

The commenters don't mention Mallory either.

According to the Horniman Museum (I am not making that up), there are 13 different lesbian flags. This is the one I think the commenter was referring to in terms of Joe's fashionista color sense.


Never mind. Dada was featured in Architectural Digest and Lesbian-Flag-Mama and Lala were not.

"The Fascinating History of Women-Only Residences: Author and advice columnist Daniel M. Lavery’s debut novel draws inspiration from the residential hotels of the 20th century" Link | Archive It's a pretty good article with pix of women's hotels, but concludes with this woke wiggle:

Today, such an endeavor could likely go the way of the controversial women’s coworking space The Wing, which was sued by a man for gender discrimination in 2018. There is also greater acceptance of different gender identities and expressions today. (Lavery, who is trans, acknowledges that there might have been closeted trans men living at women’s hotels.) Like the Beidermeier in the book, these residential hotels were indicative of a bygone era. “It became easier to really do what the women’s hotel was gesturing towards,” says Lavery, “which was to live independently.”

When not being interviewed, the independent Mister Lavery has been shopping for tea candles and wearing a flowered hat as men do when not crippled by gender stereotypes.


No Joe or Lily. "Gotcha back, thruplings." Wait, no, that's not Mal's caption.

 

[mold]

Aside from a couple brief scenes in Mad Men, I can't think of a piece of fiction that takes place in a women's hotel.

sorry for doubleposting but I saw this after I effortedposted - yeah you can’t think of them because you don’t read mid20th century British novels written by women, which is fine, it’s an odd taste, but that’s where you would find such a book. Probably the most famous is The Girls of Slender Means by Muriel Spark. You don’t read them but *Mallory does* and her choice to set her novel in NYC is very goofy.

 

[mold]

Mal's inspirators:
View attachment 6563716

Spoiler: Text

A few of the inspirations for Women's Hotel: Armistead Maupin's "Tales of the City," ."

View attachment 6563719
Is there a Mrs. Madrigal in Women's Hotel?

and all along I’ve been assuming she had never read Maupin because how could you and still suck that bad

the more I read excerpts and recaps the more depressed I get that editors were ok with the crazy fucking anachronisms. Bolsheviks and anarchists in 50s/60s NYC? Mallory you just fed Clouds of Witness into the LLM of your brain. This is embarrassing.

 

[Wonderland foster child]

Women's Hotel non-review
Chapter Thirteen: A Midnight Visitor

Katherine's AA sponsor chides her about the slap (and the rest of it), so Katherine knows she needs to apologise to Kitty for realsies and stop lying to herself. The (male) sponsor may be the most entertaining character in the novel.

Gia is making great strides towards marrying the widower, but Ruth is an appalling housekeeper. Carol (who has so little personality I couldn't name a single fact about her) sneaks her boyfriend up to her room and then they're both freaked out by Ruth who somehow got a key (no one knows how) and comes in unannounced to strip the roommate's bed. And she somehow knows the boyfriend's name, even though she wasn't told it. (This is never explained.) She is fired soon after, although not for any of that, since Carol doesn't shop her to Mrs. M.

You know how in improv, you're supposed to respond "yes, and" to build on ideas? So many characters say "no" and the plotline withers. Katherine saying yes to Kitty's request to go to court on her behalf is the shining exception.

"Lucianne and Carol began to refer to her [Ruth] by the equally admiring and mean-spirited nickname of Lily: "Because like the lily of the fields she toils not, neither does she spin, yet even Solomon in all his glory was not arranged so comfortably as she."" Matthew 6:28-29.
OH HOW INTERESTING.

Katherine and Kitty make up. The end of that story:

Spoiler

"As it happened the beat cop who had arrested her in the first place failed to show at her next court appointment, and the Irish bartender could no longer identify with real certainty just who had taken the first swing at him, and so the charges were reduced to public disorderliness and a fine. But as Kitty could not pay the fine, she ended up spending six weeks in jail all the same, later that year in August, at the absolute peak of the summer heat, and nearly stifled to death."

Meanwhile, Sadie (another non-entity) gets married without telling anyone until after the fact and will be moving out soon.

Goodreads rating currently at 3.22. I don't think I've ever seen a mainstream novel that low.

 

[monstrous bubo]

The Chatner is paywalling some content. A new development? It means we see what Tard Baby thinks will entice you to pay for the rest of the article

What Will Please The Baby?​

DANIEL LAVERY
NOV 02, 2024
∙ PAID



The baby is two days shy of being seven months old. It’s remarkable how much babies continue coming online after being born. Your baby is born, in the usual way, and you take him home, and you think you have a pretty good idea of your baby. Then a few months go by and you realize that your baby has actually been asleep the whole time, even when his eyes were open and he was yelling at you. The baby is really awake now, and full of teeth and decided preferences. He knows how to make his displeasure known, frequently and at great volume. But what does he like? What pleases the little ladling?

Pretending to sneeze is very good. He loves this. Occasionally I have experienced a genuine sneeze in his presence; oddly enough, this gets no reaction. He prefers artifice, like Dorian Gray. The more affectedly you say “Ah-choo” the better he likes it.

link

More food? A romp with the dogs? His parents? Or providing his nanny with more tedious content? Bobby Joe is as inscrutable as his mother. Given my other commitments to Substack’s coffers, I will gracefully decline to pay to discover what amuses him, as special and wonderful and unique as his tastes presumably are.

 

[Stupid Sexy Flanders]

I guess Mall has gone full circle and become a mommy blogger.