Novel set in and around the Dakota Building in New York

24th December 2018

The Dakota Winters by Tom Barbash, novel set in New York.

Tom Barbash’s latest novel focuses on a difficult period for the Winters, a family who live in the Dakota, an apartment block in Upper West Side, New York – hence the title.

The Dakota, famously the setting for the film Rosemary’s Baby and the apartment block outside which John Lennon was shot, is where Anton Winter, aged 23, returns following a stint with the Peace Corps.  Anton has contracted malaria and comes home to convalesce.  His father, the celebrated talk-show host Buddy Winter, is also at home recovering from a nervous breakdown which culminated in him walking out of his live show, a form of professional suicide from which he seems unlikely to recover. Anton’s mother is busy helping Teddy Kennedy’s campaign, Kip, Anton’s younger brother, is at school and his sister Rachel has moved out so Anton and Buddy find themselves at a loose end together and Anton takes on the task of restarting his father’s career.  When he’s not engineering Buddy’s comeback, Anton busies himself working as a busboy at a restaurant in Central Park, goes off on a sailing trip with John Lennon (John and Yoko are neighbours and friends with Buddy’s parents) and starts a romance with an English journalist.

The Dakota Winters is a tour de force in terms of re-creating time and place.  The novel is packed with references to specific events and peopled with a host of actors, rock stars, politicians and generally anyone who featured on famous talk shows in this period.  New York in 1980 is brilliantly evoked as Anton takes the reader to the fashionable bars and restaurants of the period, making for a very interesting and entertaining read.  But, of course, as we follow Anton through the year and witness his recovery and the increasing likelihood of Buddy’s successful comeback, it is impossible to forget that we are heading towards December and the fate that awaits John Lennon.

Anton’s relationship with his father is central to the novel and holds the reader’s attention when they might otherwise have been overwhelmed by the avalanche of celebrity gossip.  Anton grew up very much in the shadow of his father’s fame and has made it his mission to know more about Buddy and his career than anyone else. At the beginning of the novel Anton’s personality is subsumed by Buddy’s greater persona; Buddy even steals Anton’s Peace Corps stories, but as the story develops and as Buddy comes to rely more and more on Anton to fix his career, the roles reverse.  As a child, Anton was taught to swim by Buddy’s rather brutal method of chucking the child in the ocean and telling him to blow bubbles as he struggled to shore.  At the end of the novel, as Anton launches Buddy into a new career, “Here you go, Buddy Boy, now swim, swim!”, he feels like a parent dropping their kid at college and then heading off to get on with their own life.

As Anton finally breaks free from his brilliantly clever, but needy father and goes off to make his own career, the dreaded event of the assassination of John Lennon occurs and the reader is left pondering the ephemeral nature of fame and fortune.

The Dakota Winters is not without flaws but it is packed with interesting anecdotes and a plethora of entertaining characters and its portrayal of a difficult father-son relationship gradually evolving into something solid and lasting makes it worth reading.

Ellen for the TripFiction Team

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