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dream woman
by Laura Lippmann; William Morrow (310 pages, $ 28.99)
Gerald Andersen is pretty happy with his career as a novelist. In fact, he’s pretty happy with everything in and of itself.
But an eternal question he gets from his avid readers annoys him: Who was the real person who inspired Aubrey McFate, the adorable title character in his most successful book “Dream Girl”?
Nobody, he always says, even though he knows that “readers hate to be told that everything in fiction is not real.” She is a pure product of his imagination and every time someone suggests that he could not possibly have created such a convincing female figure, his nose goes off the rails.
Then Aubrey starts calling him.
That’s just one of Gerry’s rapidly escalating problems in “Dream Girl” – not his novel, but the 26th by bestselling author Laura Lippman.
Lippman is best known as a mystery writer, with a number of awards (Edgar, Agatha, Anthony, etc.) and her latest thriller, 2019’s Lady in the Lake, in development as an Apple + series starring Natalie Portman and Lupita Nyong ‘O. Lippman was an accomplished journalist before turning to writing novels.
And with “Dream Girl” she makes her first foray into horror.
At 61, Gerry changed his life. He recently sold his Manhattan apartment and moved back to his hometown Baltimore (and Lippmans) to care for his mother, who had dementia. She died unexpectedly days after he closed a fancy new apartment, but he decides to stay a while in the hopes that a new environment will help him get a stalled novel off the ground and get away from a recent breakup by a glamorous shakedown queen named Margot.
This plan, like him, is turned upside down when he slips on the battered concrete floor, trips over a rowing machine and falls down a floating staircase and lands on even more damaged concrete (“fk, distressed concrete, what a concept for a floor” ), where he is immobilized overnight until his assistant arrives in the morning.
His injuries are numerous, most notably a “bilateral quadriceps in his right leg. He has to lie flat on his back in this massive animal in a hospital bed for eight to twelve weeks. His injured leg is restrained to keep it still.”
Between the injuries and a heavy painkiller and sleeping pill, Gerry is almost helpless, sitting in the living room of his apartment with a window to the outside world.
During the day, his care falls on his assistant Victoria, a woman in her twenties who Gerry likes for being undemanding: “The worst assistants are the little vampires trying to turn an essentially mean job into mentorship.”
At night, a stubborn nurse named Aileen distributes the drugs. She introduces herself by looking at Gerry’s packed, voluminous bookshelves and telling him, “I hardly read at all.”
Wait, you say it reminds me of “Misery”. Yes, “Dream Girl” is a reference to Stephen King’s horror classic and maybe a little bit to his “Gerald’s Game” and a lot to Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rear Window”. Lippman has a delightful time making allusions throughout the book to a variety of literary and pop culture works on the nature of fiction. She checks some specifically by name, from Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita” to Philip Roth’s “Zuckerman Unbound”; others are fun to glimpse them – is that the shadow of “Barton Fink”? She even gives Gerry a meta-moment when he’s trying to hire a Baltimore private investigator.
Another work that is in “Dream Girl” is Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol”. Just like Scrooge, Gerry goes back in some chapters to his troubled childhood and young adulthood. But in Gerry’s dreams or nightmares or whatever they may be, the ghosts wear robes less often than #MeToo t-shirts.
Gerry thinks he’s a nice guy and definitely doesn’t see himself as a misogynist. But the more time we spend in Gerry’s head, the more we notice.
He gives college writing classes from time to time, and the only female students he notices or remembers are the beautiful ones. The first of his three failed marriages failed because his ex was “so jealous”. Okay, he had sex with a coworker once. Well maybe twice. All right, three times.
And what male writer wouldn’t respond to some of those keen female fans? When a woman shows up at your hotel bar and accepts an invitation to your room, she can’t have anything else on her mind than consensual sex, right?
Lippman weaves all of the literary play and feminist satire seamlessly into a well-made horror story – I might have held my breath for the last 100 pages as one shock merged into the other, to the wonderfully twisted ending.
“Dream Girl” has an unusual dedication, a long list of names, most of them authors who, like Lippman, have been faculty members of the Writers in Paradise program at Eckerd College St. Petersburg for the past 15 years: Andre Dubus III, Michael Koryta, Dennis Lehane, Peter Meinke, Stewart O’Nan, Les Standiford, Sterling Watson and more. While I know better than to confuse fiction and reality, I asked myself under the spell of the book: Could one of them be the person who inspired Gerry Andersen? They all seem so nice, though.
Find the final phrase in the author’s note.
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