You might think as you begin reading that you have in your hands a Wodehousian comedy of manners, but you soon realize you are being drawn into a series of quiet but devastatingly poignant lives – as if Tolstoy or Naipaul or Austen had put a specific slice of middle-class single womanhood in the mid-20th century under a microscope.
Katherine, Lucianne, Pauline, and dozens of other women are tenants in a mid-range residential hotel for women in 1967 New York – some stay for a year or two, some have been there for decades. What some might consider lives of “quiet desperation” – isolated, separated from families, short on cash – others might consider lives of complete freedom from the constrained social roles of the time. Our omniscient narrator, a wry and nonjudgmental voice, moves from woman to woman as they justify and then question the decisions that led them to this liminal state of being – not quite “at home,” but not rootless, either.
Manhattan rhythms only occasionally intrude on the stasis of the venerable Beidermeier Hotel (and when they do, the results are often hilarious), but the inner lives of the tenants are never boring. Katherine in particular, a recovering alcoholic who treasures the secure uneventfulness of her life but also finds herself drawn further and further into the eccentricities of her co-tenants, is an intricately drawn character, and a tolerant guide to this extremely brief moment in time. A few years earlier, and the Beidermeier’s inhabitants would have had no means to live independently; a handful of years later, women like Katherine would have careers, sexual independence, and the income to afford apartment life. Lavery, a bestselling essayist and former “Dear Prudence” advice columnist for Slate.com, offers in his debut novel a dreamlike, richly detailed glimpse into lives that are ordinary but no less fascinating for being so.
