#BookReview ‘Dream Girl’ by Laura Lippman

About the book…

Following up on her acclaimed and wildly successful New York Times bestseller ‘Lady In The Lake’, Laura Lippman returns with a dark, complex tale of psychological suspense with echoes of ‘Misery’ involving a novelist, incapacitated by injury, who is plagued by mysterious phone calls.

After being injured in a freak accident, novelist Gerry Andersen lies in a hospital bed in his glamorous but sterile apartment, isolated from the busy world he can see through his windows, utterly dependent on two women he barely knows: his young assistant and a night nurse whose competency he questions.

But Gerry is also beginning to question his own competency. As he moves in and out of dreamlike memories and seemingly random appearances of a persistent ex-girlfriend at his bedside, he fears he may be losing his grip on reality, much like his mother who recently passed away from dementia.

Most distressing, he believes he’s being plagued by strange telephone calls, in which a woman claiming to be the titular character of his hit novel Dream Girl swears she will be coming to see him soon. The character is completely fictitious, but no one has ever believed Gerry when he makes that claim. Is he the victim of a cruel prank—or is he actually losing his mind★ There is no record of the calls according to the log on his phone. Could there be someone he has wronged★ Is someone coming to do him harm as he lies helplessly in bed★

Then comes the morning he wakes up next to a dead body—and realizes his nightmare is just beginning…

Huge thanks to publishers Faber and Faber for approving my Netgalley request to read ‘Dream Girl’ by Laura Lippman which is out in hardcover, e-book and audiobook on June 22nd.

As acknowledged by the author herself, she categorises her book as her first foray into horror( and I would absolutely agree, it is a very modern, existential horror threaded through ‘Dream Girl’) and directly references Stephen King’s ‘Misery’ and the works of Philip Roth.

Here, she creates a deeply creepy and disturbing living tomb for writer Gerry Andersen who has returned to Baltimore to attend his dying mother. He is a narcissistic individual whose writing has been epitomised by his hit novel, ‘Dream Girl’, all of his work is now categorised as before and after.

His mother’s decline from an aggressive and hereditary form of dementia and yet, he manages to make her death about him and his concerns that his occasional episodes of blankness, and forgetfulness , could be a pre-cursor to his own diagnosis.

Having moved from his impoverished childhood in Baltimore, with a single parent, burdened with the same name as his father, his drive to succeed has taken him to New York, a fellowship at a prestigious university, and now, back home again.

Telling himself it is a temporary move, he is also hoping to have fled hanger on/succubus Margot, who he has been seeing for a year and won’t take no for an answer-even selling his apartment that she moved herself into has not got the message across-and restart his writing career.

As the story goes back and forth from the now to the past, we explore the way in which Gerry has collected, and abandoned women , including 3 ex-wives, work colleagues, casual pick ups and so forth. He blames first wife, Lucy’s, constant suspicion of infidelity for him eventually being unfaithful. He blames second wife, Sarah, for being a trophy wife and third wife Gretchen, for losing interest, none of his divorces are his responsibility. His drive to dissociate himself from having the same name as his constantly disappearing father, has ended up with him coming full circle in the way he has treated the women in his life-not his fault.

An unexpected accident leaves him bed bound, dependent on the ministrations of his night nurse, Aileen, and his assistant, Victoria. He has time, and space, to explore his life and really evaluate it, yet this opportunity to stay still and make proper changes to the way he nehaves comes back to bite him in the form of letters, emails and a disappearing tweet, all regarding ‘Dream Girl’.

The main character, Aubrey, is on the phone. Details about his genitalia are tweeted, and then vanish. A letter with a postmark from the fictional address he gave to Aubrey is glimpsed and disappears.

Is he going insane? Is it the beginnings of dementia? Is it something else altogether? And then , there is the matter of the dead body…

I am going to try really, really hard not to spoil this blisteringly fantastic and supremely clever novel, it will make you gasp, think, think again, put the book down, walk around the house, make notes, make footnotes, and start reading again.

The commentary on the way that men look at, appropriate and don’t acknowledge the input of women in their creativity is spot on-the constant asking Gerry who Aubrey is, and his vehement denial is both blackly funny and accurate. He has the finances with which he has been able to maintain his lifestyle, even after 3 divorces, and hire personal staff, yet this fortune is based on the one woman he wrote so very well that the public think it wasn’t him.

There are so many excellent motifs to enjoy, the creation of this gilded cage in which Gerry is trapped is wonderful, he has this view but it’s not one he wants to ‘see’, the layout is confusing with the bedrooms downstairs, and linked by a floating staircase-at once both completely necessary to link up and down, head and penis, yet not actually attached it a meaningful way. It’s structure is sound but the artifice in which it creates an illusion of not being secure is immediately relatable to Gerry and his talent.

This is a bit of a stretch, but ‘Dream Girl’ might possibly be seen in the terms of a Dickensian moral tale, if Gerry is seen as Scrooge, and the three most visible women in his life as the ghosts who visit him -Aileen, as the past, Victoria, as the present, and Margot, as the future-yet he resolutely does not acknowledge the place in his life that these women have, leading to the cyclic creation of a novel within a novel and an ending that made me clap my hands in utter delight.

There is no more exquisite pleasure, to my mind, than being played by a writer at the top of her game like Laura is, she snaps the trap shut around readers and characters alike and baits and switches like no one else. The dark humour which runs through it is brilliant, there is an appearance by another of Laura’s characters, Tess Monaghan, which bought to mind Agatha Christie’s ‘Murder On The Orient Express’, the scene where American philanthropist Ratchett tried to hire Poirot(and fails)

Witty, timely, prescient and skewering the reception of the #MeToo movement, and the lack of recognition of how, and why this has happened, ‘Dream Girl’ is a noir-ish horror, a literary feat, an exploration of the writing process and a love letter to the city of Baltimore. I loved every last bit of it.

About the author…

Laura Lippman is a New York Times bestselling novelist who has won more than twenty awards for her fiction, including the Edgar Award—and been nominated for thirty more.

Since her debut in 1997, she has published twenty-one novels, a novella, a children’s book, and a collection of short stories. Her books have been translated into over twenty languages. LitHub named her one of the “essential” female crime writers of the last hundred years.

She also has written for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, Vulture, Real Simple, and T magazine. The film of her novel ‘Every Secret Thing’ was produced by Frances McDormand and premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival, starring Diane Lane, Elizabeth Banks, and Dakota Fanning. Laura lives in Baltimore with her husband, David Simon, and their daughter

Links-http://www.lauralippman.com/

Twitter @LauraMLippman @FaberBooks