The Dollhouse
1952. When 17-year-old Darby McLaughlin moves from Defiance, Ohio to New York to take a secretarial course, she quickly falls under the spell of Esme, an aspiring actress and jazz singer, who works as a maid at the Barbizon Hotel for Women—aka the Dollhouse—where Darby rents a room. At once attracted and repelled by the vivacious Puerto Rican, Darby explores Esme’s New York, experimenting with the world of jazz, drugs—and what the era termed ‘degeneracy.’ At The Flatted Fifth, she falls in love with Sam, the nightclub’s talented chef, but their passion is doomed because Esme leads parallel lives and, in a desperate attempt to hold on to her friend, commits a terrible error of judgment.
2016. Rose Lewin, a denizen of the Barbizon—which has in the meantime been converted into a residence—becomes fascinated with the elderly Darby, who goes about veiled, plays the same jazz record over and over, and is rumored to have been involved in a murder. A journalist whose career and relationship have hit rock bottom, Rose sets about investigating the biography of the mysterious lady and discovers not only a horrifying secret, but also a beautiful friendship, which will change the lives of both women forever.
Highly readable, The Dollhouse conjures up 1950s New York convincingly. In particular the now-vanished world of the Barbizon Hotel for Women, with its antiquated rules and intriguing array of female personalities and tragic fates, lives on in the pages of the novel in delectable detail. Although the ending is a little too perfect, the reference to Austen and Brontë, whose novels Darby reads, tells us that this is no mere ‘chick-lit,’ but feminist-inspired entertainment.
