Somewhere in between a modern apartment building and a Hilton or Holiday Inn lies the Biedermeier, an unassuming hotel in the heart of 1960s New York City and the subject of Daniel M. Lavery’s Women’s Hotel. The building’s hallways bustle with women both old and young, all hailing from different hometowns, with different backgrounds and big-city dreams. As residents come and go and life plans take detours, Women’s Hotel masterfully captures the joys of community, neighborliness and circumstantial friendships that this bygone mode of living made possible.
Katherine, a Biedermeier floor manager and Mrs. Mossler’s second-in-command, might ride the elevator up to retrieve pinking shears from Carol or down to negotiate favors with Kitty. She might walk over to Lucianne’s to gossip, visit J.D. to stare curiously at her stray cat or accompany Pauline to a meeting of political activists. In Women’s Hotel, these events aren’t linked by an ongoing mystery or conflict. Instead, each resident’s experience is blended stylistically in a way that imitates the inseparability of real lives. The intentionally minimal plot allows Lavery to focus on intimately exploring this unique moment in time; in his own words, the novel should “be taken for no more than what it is: a diffuse sketch of a short-lived, patchwork commonwealth, 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.” In extracting beauty from ordinary stories easily overlooked, he’s created a memorable novel.
Lavery, a bestselling author, former Slate advice columnist and cofounder of The Toast, writes in a style reminiscent of contemporary wordsmiths Nathan Hill and James McBride. Through sentences of remarkable elegance, humor and complexity of phrase, the Biedermeier is drawn so vividly that it nearly becomes a character in itself. The women’s hotel stands tall as a deeply loved, grounding constant for its countless tenants, tenants who will always tease, entertain, support, exasperate and—above all—protect each other to no end.
Read more: Daniel M. Lavery on the universally torturous experience of moving house.
