When I think of 1950s New York City and the women who might have lived in the famous Barbizon Hotel during its heyday, I have an image of Audrey Hepburn in mind or Grace Kelly during her Alfred Hitchcock years. Women were elegant back then in a way they aren't quite as elegant today. Even movie stars walking the red carpet to the Oscars aren't exactly the same kind of elegant in that glamorous-white-glove-upswept-hair sort of way they were in the 50s. Or maybe I have a particular nostalgic image of what it might have been like. Nostalgia usually means seeing the world through rose-colored glasses. Fiona Davis's recently released historical novel, The Dollhouse certainly cuts through that nostalgic image. There is a glitziness to the story that belies the sordidness that lies just beneath the surface. Real lives are messy no matter how elegantly we dress them up.
The 'Dollhouse' is the pet name given by young men to the Barbizon hotel, which was a residence for 'quality' young women whose families could rest assured that their daughters were well looked after while working or studying in New York City. This was the period of women aspiring mostly to jobs as secretaries or in the world of publishing and maybe for a select few to become models, all the while having a sharp eye turned towards marriage with just the right, up-and-coming eligible young man. The Barbizon is where Sylvia Plath spent her summer while working as a guest editor for Mademoiselle Magazine if that helps you create just the right picture in your mind.
Fiona Davis uses the famous hotel as the backdrop to her novel told in parallel storylines switching from 1952 to modern day NYC where women's lives are both vastly different yet curiously in many ways still very much the same. The white gloves may be gone and women are less likely to be worried about marrying just the right young man, but the question of how to find happiness and success either solo or within in a relationship is still valid. And the problem of how to be happy being independent and alone yet not being lonely is one even I seem to be grappling with these days.
Often in dual narratives one thread is stronger or more interesting than the other. And often it is the story set in whatever distant historical past that calls out to me more strongly than the other. In the case of The Dollhouse, I was pleasantly surprised to find I was equally happy inhabiting either period. The story begins in contemporary NYC where Rose Lewin has given up her comfortable apartment and left a reliable job to take a risk on a new relationship and with a job at a media start-up at the trendy (despite its awful name) WordMerge. She is living in the Barbizon with Griff, a NYC politician being groomed for bigger things. On the floor below hers live a number of single women--holdovers from the Barbizon's 1950s past. Who can blame them for not wanting to give up rent controlled apartments in a city where nothing comes cheap.
Rose is intrigued by the women and wonders about their "stories", why are they still there and what were their lives like? It would make the perfect feature for WordMerge if she could interview the women. And the 'hook' is even better. She runs into one of the women who wears a dainty hat with a veil covering part of her face. There are rumors of a scandal in the hotel's past involving the veiled woman, a maid and a skirmish that left one woman dead and the other scarred for life.
Flash back to 1952 and newly arrived Darby McLaughlin who has come to New York to attend Katherine Gibbs and become a secretary. She is an innocent from Ohio with little self-confidence and wavering self-esteem. She thinks of herself as plain, which is not helped by being unceremoniously dumped on the floor housing the Eileen Ford girls--perfectly coiffed, leggy young women that the others refer to (not in the least kindly) as the "giraffes". Why does that kind of elegant beauty so often come in unfriendly, snobbish packages? After a particularly nasty run in with one of the models, Darby is saved by a hotel maid, Esme, whose Puerto Rican accent and ethnic features sets her apart from the others. But Esme has just as many dreams as the other girls. She is studying to become an actress and spends her nights working as a hatcheck girl in a jazz club where they sometimes let her sing.
Davis brings these two threads of the story together nicely, interlacing them both in the present as well as the past. Rose's research for the story borders on obsessive and she begins to walk a fine line between investigative reporting and meddling into the life of a woman who would prefer to keep the past safely buried away. Two lives that should be filled with happy opportunities are thrown into upheavals--that messy life thing I referred to earlier. I won't give all the plot twists away and all the best details are left for you to discover.
This is a marvelously beachy sort of book that will easily take you into fall. It's an engaging story with a hint of elegance covering a scandalous history and you know how those sorts of stories can be real page-turners. But the best thing about the novel is how Davis peels back the layers of myth and image to reveal flesh and blood characters trying to find their own corner in the world where they can be happy and fulfilled. This is Fiona Davis's debut novel and I look forward to her next. Many thanks to Dutton (Penguin/Random House) for sending this book my way.