Women's Hotel

August 5, 2024
Lavery’s appealingly offbeat debut novel (after the memoir Something That May Shock and Discredit You) explores the importance of a women’s hotel in the lives of its residents. As the story opens in 1960s New York City, breakfast at the Biedermeier, which was developed in the 1930s as a temporary residence for the burgeoning “office-girl generation,” has been discontinued, much to the displeasure of its residents. Katherine Heap, a longtime resident who’s since joined the staff as first-floor director, promises to pass along their complaints. Katherine’s backstory reveals the roots of her devotion to the Biedermeier, showing how as a 22-year-old recent transplant from Ohio, she found a new community and the strength to stay sober. Among the other residents are Lucianne Caruso, whose romantic and professional ups and downs Lavery chronicles to sympathetic effect; journalist Pauline Carter, who carries the flame of her Upper Manhattan family’s devotion to anarchism; Carol Lipscomb, a classics student who forms a makeshift art collective; and telephone operator Kitty Milham. There’s not much of a plot, but there are plenty of dramatic and consequential episodes, such as Katherine’s ill-fated attempt to help Kitty by impersonating her for a scheduled court appearance. Lavery colorfully captures the hotel in the last glimmers of its heyday and brings the misfit residents to life. Patient readers will find much to savor.

Starred review from August 15, 2024
This comic novel follows the lives of the denizens of the titular women's hotel in 1960s New York. For 35 years, the Biedermeier has provided room and half board to the working women who make it their home. But when the hotel's ever-shrinking income forces Mrs. Mossler, the proprietress, to contemplate cutting the first meal of the day, staff members and residents are forced to consider that the establishment's days may be numbered. Lavery's long-form fiction debut is less an intricately plotted novel than a collection of minor tribulations and close observations. Luckily, he has assembled a cast that charms from page 1, including Katherine, the capable and somewhat too accommodating first-floor director; Stephen, an elevator operator who's a borderline extortionist on moving day; Kitty, a first-floor resident who's simply shameless about asking for favors; Pauline, a second-floor resident and part-time revolutionary; Lucianne, a third-floor resident and social columnist; J.D., a fourth-floor resident and George Sand biographer; Dolly, a lesbian bartender who also lives on the fourth floor--plus two new arrivals, the glamorous Gia and the rather hopeless Ruth. Despite the substantial ensemble and modest page count, every character is distinct and their backstories, misadventures, and little victories intertwine skillfully. Lavery has a wonderful ear for a period turn-of-phrase and his prose glitters with humor and affection for human foibles--for example, "Stephen was a sort of perpetual student who worked toward his degree after the manner of the fairy bird in the Brothers Grimm story about eternity, who every hundred years flew to the top of a distant mountain and sharpened his beak on it." Readers will be hard-pressed not to read sections aloud to passersby. For those unafraid to meander, a stay at the Biedermeier is pure pleasure.

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August 23, 2024

Lavery (Something That May Shock and Discredit You), former "Dear Prudence" advice columnist at Slate and cofounder of The Toast, writes his first novel, set in the 1960s at the Beidermeier, a New York City women's hotel that houses an eclectic group of residents, each with their own challenges. With a 75K-copy first printing. Prepub Alert.

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September 1, 2024
Lavery's first novel since leaving Slate's Dear Prudence advice column behind tells the story of a hotel specifically for women located in New York City in the 1960s. Inside this hotel, the residents live, love, and eat (precisely on schedule), and make the most of their lives in this strange and beautiful institution. Lavery's elegant, aching, and outright hilarious prose highlights the lives of these women as they find and lose jobs, upend their entire lives, make friends and forge bonds that, despite the transitory nature of the hotel, will last a lifetime. Women from all walks of life come together in this poignant novel--Katherine, the first-floor manager, Lucianne, who dreams of an unconventional life free of authority, and many more. Their personality traits and the decisions they make, perhaps because they live so close together, seem larger-than-life, and yet, parts of this novel are gorgeously ordinary in the face of extraordinary circumstances. Women's Hotel is a prime example of mastery of a craft; readers will want to devour it in a single sitting.

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