Women's Hotel by Danny Lavery

The Audacious Book Club November Selection

Daniel Lavery’s first book, the 2014 Texts from Jane Eyre, reimagines some of our favorite literary characters through text conversations. Take Hamlet, for example: in his texts with his mother Gertrude, he is surly and petulant, far more childish than tragic. “Hey kiddo. Are you coming down for dinner,” Gertrude types. “Fuck you,” responds Hamlet. The backtalk continues:

“Okay. Sorry honey.” 

“You’re not sorry at all.” 

“Do you want me to bring you a sandwich?” 

“I wish I was dead.” 

Texts from Jane Eyre—a project which started with posts on The Hairpin and eventually migrated to The Toast, the website Lavery ran with Nicole Cliffe until 2016 —are irreverent: mean and bawdy and, for strict adherents to the canon, bordering on sacrilege, but they are also also very smart and funny as hell. The whole book—which includes invented texts from characters such as Hamlet, Virginia Woolf, and Heathcliff and Cathy from Wuthering Heights—is a wicked delight, scraps of literary history distilled and reconstituted with Lavery’s characteristic wit and inventiveness, determined both to unsettle us and to make us laugh.  

Lavery’s debut novel Women’s Hotel is constructed on a similar foundation of humor and discombobulation, but here, both are restrained, pulled to heel in favor of something more complex. In Lavery’s carefully constructed world, it is 1960s New York, and even more precisely, it is the Biedermeier, a woman’s hotel that is home to single women (and a few men) who have found their way into communal living in a manner that’s not quite collective, with few social ties and little grounding, a way of living in not-quite solitude together in a sort of boarding house that Lavery notes in his author’s note was short-lived and, like other institutions that made homes for single women, rendered obsolete by the cultural shifts and social and policy progress that marked the middle of the 20th century. 

What Lavery accomplishes in this book is a glorious voyeurism: we get to peek into the various windows of the resident rooms the Biedermeier, dip in and out of the stories like that of Katherine, floor director for the other residents; Dolly, a lesbian bartender; the glittering Gia who seems to have her heart set on marriage, and Stephen, the elevator operator and one of the few men in the building. All of the Biedermeier’s residents are wrestling with something: pain, loneliness, hungers of all kinds, often in both profound and deeply mundane ways. Where Texts from Jane Eyre was a wickedly funny, witty gimmick, Women’s Hotel is controlled, deeply heartfelt, and often surprising, an homage to writers who excel at capturing the nuances of culture and social class, especially how those nuances affect the people often hovering at the margins. Lavery’s Biedermeier is not just a setting or a dwelling place, but in the spirit of Edith Wharton, it becomes a site steeped in the secrecy, the suffocations, and the dramatic possibilities of its residents. Women’s Hotel is also an astute commentary on a mid-20th century lifestyle suffused with anxiety and on the cusp of massive cultural change; much like Shirley Jackson, Lavery uses humor and affection, not just horror or heaviness, to assuage those anxieties and upend his reader’s expectations. 

Women’s Hotel is a delicious novel, a balancing act of restraint and excess that kept me invested. I’ve known Danny and followed his work for many years, and it’s lovely to be reading his work with you throughout the month of November. I’m looking forward to our discussion. And we will be in conversation with Danny on November 20th at 8 pm EST/5 pm PST.