All The Single Ladies

There’s always been (and probably always will be) a housing crisis in New York, but in the early 1900s there was a very particular kind of problem: more women were working, and moving to the city for jobs and fun, but where could they stay? They weren’t paid much, so they needed cheap rents. Their parents were concerned about safety and morality, and so were the upstanding citizens of New York with all these single women on the loose, so some kind of supervision was demanded. Thus emerged the ‘women’s hotels’ that are at the center of Daniel Lavery’s eponymous novel.

The particular hotel that Lavery writes about is the Biedermeier. It has 15 floors of rooms, managed by a sort of den-mother/matron, along with ‘floor directors’ on each floor who deal with the quotidian problems of a large number of individual residents.

Lavery’s book is set in the 1960s, when these women’s hotels were falling of favour and each year the Biedermeier had fewer new residents.

The 1960s — the period of the Vietnam War protests, free love, the Civil Rights movement, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Stonewall gay rights protests in New York City, and last but not least, a burgeoning women’s rights movements sparked by Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem. Many of these cultural changes were centered around New York, but they are not reflected in this book. In fact, much of America stayed apart from these cultural movements, and that is perhaps what Lavery intends to point out in this novel. The lack of historical context, however, makes the book seem old-fashioned, as if it was set in the 1930s or so. Adding to this old-fashioned feel is Lavery’s style of writing, which also seems a little old-fashioned.

For thirty-five years, every Biedermeier girl whose rent for the coming week had found its way to Mrs. Mossler’s crocheted lantern-bag could go to sleep secure in the knowledge that she would wake up with a breakfast tray slid into the recesses of her door, delivered just as advertised, “silently and gratuitously, no waiting — no waiter!”. During the war the fourteen-dollar rent was raised to eighteen dollars, then again to twenty-five dollars after Carmine DeSapio replaced Hugo Rogers as the head of Tammany, Mrs. Mossler certain that a non-Irish Tammany boss was a harbinger of the rising prices, social upheaval and general chaos soon to follow.

The paragraph above is very representative of the novel: long complex sentences that require careful reading, a throwaway mention of a historical event that the reader might not be familiar with, and by the end of the paragraph, no sense of where the next sentence might go. Breakfasts? Tammany Hall? Social unrest?

Yet there is a pleasant charm to the intricate but carefully-constructed sentences. Lavery is in control of the thread throughout, despite what seems like random ramblings. Occasionally he goes a little too far, producing sentences that are mildly inexplicable (to this reader at least):

Pauline said “Lucianne is the fifth column’s fifth column. My greatest ambition for her is that we can arrive at a nonviolent agreement in exchange for some free sandwiches.”

Instead she murmured something tactful and nodded vaguely, and then after trading a few less keenly felt remarks about the weather, which was fine and seasonable, and the sermon, which had to do with whether Paul’s taking-up of Eutychus in Acts should properly be considered a resurrection from the dead, in the manner of Lazarus and Tabitha and the daughter of Jairus, or whether it should be considered instead a revival and therefore merely a simple healing miracle, like that of the beggar at the Gate Beautiful, Altheah drifted away.

Okay, there the author is simply showing off his obscure Biblical knowledge, and it rather detracts from the flow of the novel. Luckily, such extended digressions are few (or perhaps I just got used to them).

The novel is structured rather like the cover image: a set of vignettes focusing on one or another resident. The backstories of the main characters are presented randomly; there is nothing so predictable as a chapter devoted to each character. Katherine is the floor director and second-in-command to Mrs. Mossler; she has lived at the Biedermeier for 9 years, and seems the quintessential capable spinster, but in Chapter 4 we discover unexpectedly that she has been an alcoholic from age 16, and was packed off to New York by her parents to avoid social shame. Lucianne is from an upper-class family, dresses elegantly, is vain, and has a host of friends who can be inveigled into inviting her to lunch. Patricia, Sadie and Carol are artists who share a room and despite all their part-time jobs, have at most a single income between them. Pauline was brought up by her anarchist grandparents. And there are many more — Kitty, Dolly, Nicola … and then halfway through the book, the new residents Gia and Ruth.

With so many characters, I think most readers will find it very difficult to keep track of the names and personalities.

There is one man, Stephen, a perpetual student at Cooper Union who is officially the elevator operator, but who is very much part of the Biedermeier family. Stephen is gay, and had been

expelled from the Boy Scouts, junior high school, and Model Congress for his precocious homosexual activity

He had been accepted to four colleges in New York City and asked each of them

Would you permit a homosexual student to register, if he were otherwise an outstanding candidate?

It is therefore rather unconvincing when Stephen sleeps with Lucianne.

The residents of the Biedermeier are distinctly poor. Many of them seem to have no jobs or part-time jobs, and struggle to make their rent. They rely on the breakfasts and dinners at the Biedermeier for food, and scrounge free food wherever they can.

[Carol] “I can’t possibly steal any more cold cuts from the faculty dining room than I already do. I smell like a butcher shop half the year. I’ve stretched all my begging and borrowing powers to the absolute limit.”

“Of course, it mightn’t be so bad if we could keep a toaster and a kettle in our rooms,” Sadie said.

Despite their poverty, the younger women are drawn as upbeat, cheerful, peppy, and funny, and hunger never seems to drive them to despair. It’s the older women who feel fear at the possible loss of their Biedermeier breakfasts.

Some of the older residents, such as Josephine and J.D, who had not left the building for work in years, had neither the resiliency of youth nor the quality of originality that might have made such a change feel slightly frightening but still something like an adventure, which might bring with it the possibility of being sharpened rather than like a sudden and terrifying pitch downwards.

This novel is dense and fractured, rather discouraging to a reader, but there are some lovely paragraphs and chapters that are almost like elegant essays. I chose this book based on its subject, and all said, I’m glad I worked my way through to the end. I’d recommend it only to readers with time and patience, though.

_{Credit to Beyonce for the title of this review 🙂}